Social Media's Role in your Online Business Growth | Get Fact Up #45

Now you probably already know that we’re big fans of Social Media. We’ve done around 10 episodes on this already. But something we find a lot of people struggle with is how spending time on social relates to getting more business.

The problem is that the connection isn’t that clear.

You know social works well for some businesses, but it seems like a lot of trial and error - and it’s hard to tell if conversions are related social media, or something else.

First let's look at a good method for for using social media for business.

If you are writing blogs, creating infographics or videos, you should definitely be sharing them on your social media channels - and - they should have a link back to the relevant content on your website. You should also be using paid promotion to extend the reach of this content past your existing followers.

Now what you want to look for is engagement. Engagement is when someone interacts with a social post - this can mean “liking”, “favoriting” or “upvoting” - but what you really want to see is comments, shares and tagging, as this is what gets your post seen by friends of friends of friends.

Social media is a great way to find what is resonating with your potential customers. The content you post that has higher engagement on social media is more valuable to you potential customers, and will perform better in other marketing channels, such as organic search.

Put plainly, if it works on social media, it’s good content overall. The difference with social media is that you get feedback almost instantly.

A lot of people think social signals are a ranking factor for search, but according to Google’s Matt Cutts, google doesn’t check your social shares. It’s much more simple: good content on social media is good content anywhere.

Now speaking of google, lets take a look at social media in google analytics.

If you look in your acquisition tab, you can see that there’s a channels section under all traffic. This is where you see all your traffic categorised.

What you probably didn’t know is that your “direct” traffic is also usually 70% from social media also. This is known as “Dark Social” traffic - which is not a sinister as it sounds - it’s just social media traffic that is not allowing as much tracking data.

When someone finds your content on social, they may have their privacy settings set very high. Google analytics is not allowed to see where this person came from, so it will add them under your “direct” traffic.

So keep in mind when you are reviewing your social media performance, that your social traffic is usually more than what is shown. And if you are getting conversions in direct traffic, there’s a good chance it was thanks to social media.

And speaking of conversions, if you are using social media for promoting your business, you should definitely have conversion tracking setup. This is done by getting your tracking code and adding it to your thankyou page after an enquiry or purchase.

This will give you a bottom line when you are checking your social media insights, and is especially important if you are using paid advertising on your social channels.

On facebook for example, your “tracking pixel” will allow you to automatically show your content to display to groups of people that convert higher.

And that’s about all we have time for today folks, as always if you have any questions, or want us to do a video on a certain topic, just drop a comment below, send or send us an email.

See you next week!