[Build Backlinks Online] Forget Google's Games - Make Social a Primary Traffic Source

Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Forget Google's Games - Make
Social a Primary Traffic Source'


Posted by simonpenson
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

For most business owners social is a toy. The marketing equivalent of that
friend we all have outside our professional lives that you just donât talk
to your work colleagues about. Even though they are really the life and soul of
the party.


But things are changing. A recent Forrester survey unlocked some startling
stats about how we are all discovering things online.


Discovery is Googleâs heartland. The very thing it has built its empire
upon and yet it seems that a seismic shift is occurring. According to the
research piece almost 50% of those in the 18 to 23 bracket used social as their
primary discovery engine in the last year.


Those stats should make Google think very carefully indeed about its future
strategy and how to keep its users, and advertisers, happy.


For a marketer such information should be impetus to think very seriously
about strategy, and where to invest that budget in the next few years as we are
finally given another way to access audiences at scale online.


Tipping Point


As powerful as that survey is, however, it is not enough alone to get you to
invest hard fought marketing dollars on social, but for me there is an even more
powerful argument brewing.


As we know, the ability to intelligently target consumers has always been the
zenith for marketers. To do it well you need to be able to collect, and then
slice and dice, information about the people using your platform.


Googleâs been pretty good at this to date, as the propensity to buy has
always been high from search queries. Social, however takes that data to a whole
other level.


It is this, and the fact that in attempting to monetize the social space
themselves the likes of Facebook and Twitter have opened the door for all of us
to do the same thing with our own social audiences that really does suggest that
a true tipping point has now been reached.


Is Google walking a dangerous line?


The problem for social until now has always been Googleâs dominance,
specifically its unrelenting focus on making search the only place you need to
look to find your audience.


Until recently, few would have argued with that mantra. But things are
changing.


The level of flux in organic SERPs and shrinking margins in paid are making
many people look again, not just at their strategy generally but at the trust
they have put in the brand for so long. I talk to business owners weekly who say
they have âhad enoughâ of having their eggs in one basket and want a
âsaferâ, more diverse, strategy.


Combine that with the fact that social now offers both audience size and
access to the right people within it and the scales begin to tip significantly.
Letâs look at that picture in more detail now.


Socialâs key trump card


Until very recently social has been perceived as very much a
âcreativeâ game. One for progressing conversations and engaging with
people but not for making money directly. And while this is still very much a
big part of the tactical piece there is now a layer of science sitting above it,
which it critical to the success of any strategy.


That layer is all about the collection and interpretation of the right data to
inform the entire marketing strategy.


As search marketers we have always known the power of data in informing
strategies that convert into sales. Digital marketing is, after all, about not
having to guess any more as the data is there to inform the strategy.


Social data takes that insight to a whole other level. Richer and more
connected than whatever search can throw at us, it tells us such things as:


The age breakdown of our audience.

How often they interact with our content. (this post digs deeply into this)
Precisely when they want that content and in what form.
What other passions or interests they have.
Deeper demographic data.
Plus much more.

All of the info above can be obtained to a certain depth within Facebook's
Insights interface. A guide to how that works can be found here.

Google is concerned by this and the subsequent ability to target advertising
into that space. Itâs one of the key motivators behind the creation of
Google+ alongside the obvious use the data has as a tool to power its
personalisation and semantic plans.


Access is improving


Add better and more robust access to the platforms and we suddenly start to
see why social is becoming so attractive. Facebook in particular has started to
change mindsets around commercialization of social too and that opens the doors
to all marketers to follow suit.


And with APIs opening up and becoming more robust, analytics improving and
self-serve ad systems launching, we now have the keys to access the audience.


Where should you invest?


The question now is where should you invest and begin to execute a strategy
that returns positive ROI.


The simple answer is to view social not as a âcommunity
managementâ project, but as a science, designed to attract precisely the
right people with the right content and to engage with them long enough that
they convert. Consistently.


Facebook, Facebook, Facebook


Choosing the platform to center your strategy on is tough, but through testing
and experience it has become clear, to me at least, that for 90% of businesses
Facebook should be the commercial hub of your activity.


We have spent in excess of 500,000 on social advertising over the past 18
months and it's that activity that has taught us the value of Facebook from an
ROI perspective. It also lacks any real competitor in real terms as a central,
all-encompassing social audience aggregator.


Google+ has no real part to play as a pure social play platform. There is no
doubting the potential there for search benefits, but outside of tech industries
it is very much a wasteland at present.


Twitter is useful as a distribution channel and, if you lean on its ad
functionality, it has a place as a broadcast medium, but past that its strength
really lies in being used as a customer service tool.


Pinterest is another worth considering, especially if you work in a creative
industry, but again its one-dimensional content USP and lack of access makes it
a limited option, for now.


Others like LinkedIn are working hard to improve the way they surface content
and curate but they still have a long way to go. Sponsored content is certainly
a step in the right direction.


And that leaves the king of them all. Facebook. A platform with the three key
characteristics required for success:


Access to a large audience (1 billion+ and counting).
Access to data (to understand and measure marketing efforts).
The ability to target and refine strategy based on user interest.

The question then is: âHow do I go about making a platform, where I
regularly see people sharing pictures of their favourite cat, work for my
business?â Thatâs what we will dig into now.

Three phase strategy


Structure and process is key to making any marketing strategy work and social
is no different.


There are three key stages to any social plan and they are:


Audience Growth
Engagement
Monetization


Without any one of the three you are doomed to failure and what is even more
important is the fact that this is no linear process. You need to work
consistently on all three, cycling through them all one by one to ensure growth
and improvement is possible across all of them.


Growth


The first stage is the most important as without enough of the RIGHT people
(and weâll come to that) you simply wonât be able to monetize to a
level where the project can be seen as a success.


That does NOT mean aggressively acquiring fans from anywhere. We have had
clients come to us with 1 million 'Likes', complaining that they canât
monetize. The answer to why always sat very squarely with the type of people
they had attracted and a content strategy that simply was not aligned to the
right people.


You are looking for a relatively small audience in reality, but one that
engages regularly with your content.


But how do you find those people? The answer is actually simpler than you
think.


Digging into the data


Those that have access to the Facebook API are a lucky bunch. The data
available out the back door is rich enough to make any Google engineerâs
eyes water.


While search engines spit out fairly two dimensional, quantitative data around
search behavior, social gives so much more. It tells us about the people. Their
passions, relationships, loves and hates.


For any marketer that is rocket fuel.


And the great news is that you can not only look at what your audiences are
interested in, but also what other brands' audiences, and even general interest
'sets' are into (such as 'digital marketing' as a whole). That means you can spy
on your competitors, which makes the data even more powerful. And if you have
pumped your account full of cheap 'fans' and want a cleaner view you have the
ability to simply look at similar brand audiences for the answers.


But you havenât got API access right? Sure, but there is still hope and
it comes in the form of Facebookâs Power Editor.




While rarely publicized, this little gem of a tool allows the user to dig into
and segment data based on pages or groups of âLikesâ, which means
for the marketer that you can understand, in granular detail, more about your
audienceâs interests or those of your competitors. More
âstuffâ about what they care about as people.


It's accessible to all and to get it all you have to do is follow this simple
step-by-step to install it on your account. It does require you to use the
Chrome browser at this stage but that will change in time. It's a free addition
to your account and does not require you to spend money to use it either and
'free tools' are always a friend to all marketers!


We use Power Editor to segment by setting up a series of adverts with
different targeting - similar to A/B testing. This allows us to choose different
targeting for each segment, and in turn it gives us the estimated reach for each
interest set. Capturing and correlating this data allows us to draw great
insights in terms of audience interests.


By finding out how many fans of a Page âLikeâ certain interest
sets, such as football related pages you can quickly work out generalist
interest sets and from that even correlate against the average Facebook audience
to discover if the brand or Page has a high percentage of football fans, for
example.


To help explain how such data can be used letâs examine the Moz and
general digital marketing audience. For this purpose the digital marketing
audience is defined as the people who 'Like' Digital marketing Pages on
Facebook.


Below you can see clearly that the digital marketing audience correlates
nicely with the overall Facebook audience (the dark blue line is the general
audience and the light blue line is digital marketing). No great surprises so
far.




But where it begins to get really interesting is when we start looking deeper;
at what other interests the digital marketer has.


Again we can see here the general FB audience in dark blue and how interest
sets vary against the digital marketing audience.


We can clearly see the digital segment over-indexes insanely around business,
gaming, sci-fi, mobile devices and, interestingly, cycling, while it is clear
that celebrities, pop music and fashion are really not that exciting for us
(does that suggest weâre uncool?).




Diving deeper still we can extrapolate specific topics of most interest and we
end up with something that looks a little like this:




As you can see we love Mashable and Steve Jobs (no surprise there) but the
Wall Street Journal, Game of Thrones and Walking Dead may not be quite so
obvious. Having this kind of info at hand gives you the ability to really target
paid, owned and earned activity precisely where it will have most effect.


Using the insight


All the data in the world is irrelevant though if you have no way of using it
in your day-to-day activity. So how does knowing this help?


In simple terms knowing who you are writing for or advertising to means that
you can tailor your âcontentâ specifically at them, improving
engagement and click through.


Paid media


In paid it means that you can be MUCH smarter with your spend and it opens up
a whole other world to your targeting.


Forget looking to target people that just like âSEOâ or
âdigital marketing' and look instead for what other interests they have.
Run campaigns that capture them in âotherâ places where they are
likely to be; where their interests over-index against the average person.


If I were lucky enough to be a Moz marketer, for instance, I would absolutely
look to target some social campaigns around the sci-fi audience. We know there
is a high correlation between that market and digital and youâll also pay
less per click for the privilege â reaching the âsameâ people
for less and therefore improving the potential ROI of any campaign.


By targeting sci-fi fans you get the opportunity to reach those same 'digital
marketers' in a less competitive space and those people that are not into the
subject matter are immaterial anyway as they will simply 'ignore' the
advertising, which is not a problem when you are paying Cost per Click, of
course.


Content strategy


For content too this offers incredible levels of insight. Historically I had
always been one of the very worst offenders when it came to believing that my
creative content ideas were the best. That came from spending a decade in print,
working âblindâ in terms of audience insight. My ideas were the best
ideas going on in my own head.


The reality though, is that with data like this available you no longer have
to guess, or rely on your own twisted understanding of what your reader may
like.


I ensure that the data is integrated into the initial and ongoing
brainstorming process each and every time to keep ideas tied to interests we
know are likely to be engaged with and consumed. You can see that ideation
process below and where data fits into it:




Engagement


Growth is one thing. Creating enough engaging content consistently is entirely
another, however, and while you cannot engage without an audience, without
engagement you have little to no chance of monetizing or organically growing
your reach.


And to do that, on Facebook, at least, you must bow down to the majesty of
Edgerank.


Edgerank


The majority of you will be more than aware of Facebookâs algorithm, but
for those that donât it is the âthingâ responsible for what
you see and donât see within your News Feed. And while internally Facebook
says it no longer uses 'Edgerank' and that the algorithm governing feeds is now
more complex the three key pillars still very much exist.


Iâm not going to go in the complexities of that right here. This site
does a great job of that should you require more background.


The basis of it is that the more you interact with a post, or a person, the
more likely you are to see more posts from them in the future. And visibility
means prizes, as we know only too well from search.


So, how can you better create content that resonates, aside from utilizing the
data already discussed?


Use of the following content âtipsâ can certainly help in my
experience:


Top tips



Images â Almost all social networks are geared up to push visual content.
It makes them more interesting and it is proven that images provoke more
powerful, emotional responses than text.

Competitions â But weâre not just talking âfree iPadâ
here. They only work well when the prize is closely tied to the insight (so a
more thoughtful prize based on their âLikesâ) and these further tips
also help.

Exclusive offers â Being able to make your Page feel
âexclusiveâ by creating bespoke offers is good because people share
for two key reasons: 1. To show off. 2. To help a friend, and you benefit from
both.

Curation â You do not need unlimited creation resource, as good curation
is very powerful too. Play the newspaper editor role and filter the
âtrashâ so your audience doesnât have to. Theyâll thank
you for it.

Listening â Not a content âtypeâ, but being plugged into what
is being talked about has long been a key social topic. Your reason for doing it
though is NOT to sell, but to help. Get as close to your audience as possible.

Timing â The beauty of social data is real time feedback. You can see what
works! To test on Google+ I like Timing+, but for Facebook, the focus of this
piece and our strategy, Pageplanner is a great, low cost option.

HIPPO â Iâm passionate about this one, and not because I like big
grey animals, but because HIPPO stands for 'Highest Paid Personâs
Opinion'. Or more importantly their involvement in the Page. If they are visible
you win trust from your customers and the hearts and minds of your business in
taking social seriously. Get them to write a weekly post or host a webinar or
chat.

Webinars â A great way to combine a winning content type, in video, with
thought leadership. Webinars allow you to put across brand values personally
through social.

Geo-location of content â Few think about segmenting content strategy by
geography, but on a Page with a lot of followers it can be a killer strategy.
Refine posts based on where the reader is will do wonders for engagement. Again,
tools like Page Planner can make this really simple.


Validate effectiveness


All of the above work to greater or lesser degrees in different markets. The
beauty of social though is that you can very quickly learn what works for your
audience thanks to real time engagement insight. Facebookâs own reporting
tool gives a view on this and we have created our own version, which also allows
you to add in other Pages, so you can keep an eye on competitor strategies
within the same view, as you can see below:




Monetization


For business it is the value of what âcomes out the other endâ.
You can have all the fancy, soft metrics in the world, but without the
âKer-ching!â moment the value is lost on most.


The great news is that the commercialization of Facebook has opened the door
to all marketers and made it more acceptable to start looking at ways to
monetize.


Editorial V Ads


And that brings us back to an age-old battle: one between editorial and
advertising/commercial âcontentâ to a content driven audience.


It is a battle that has been fought for decades at newspapers, magazines, TV
and radio stations as media companies attempt to maximize revenues without
sacrificing audience.


And we are now going to have to get used to it in digital, past simply
juggling how many ad spots we have on our site. Commercialism within content
goes much deeper than that.


So, how do you get it right in social? The great news is that the real time
engagement data is available, as explained earlier, and getting it
ârightâ is simply a case of playing with the relationship between
editorial posts and more commercial ones.


Below you can see a screenshot of a social client we work with and you can see
more clearly the difference between the two post types.




On the right you have a âcommercialâ post, linking back through to
a pre-order on the website and this sits comfortably with the
âeditorialâ piece on the left.


Try adding a commercial post every fourth post to begin with and then work
from there, monitoring engagement rates and fan counts for signs of drop off. As
soon as that happens reduce it and stick to that ratio.


Vertical Pages


For those without an âoff pageâ monetization opportunity there is
also a sneaky little model you can try for yourself.


Iâve been playing with a small handful of Pages myself, building content
strategies and investing in some fan acquisition activity to build up relevant
niche audiences around such things as parenting and finance.


Once those pages are established and you have an audience of around 5,000+
people you can follow that same ad/editorial model replacing the commercial
link-to-site with a simple affiliate link. That way you can begin monetizing via
the affiliate route.


Measurement


Of course, no monetization project is complete without the measurement piece
and the good news again here is that our ability to measure socialâs
impact on the bottom line has improved drastically too in line with the
genreâs own path towards commercialization.


Google Analytics and other analytic packages now help us understand clearly
not just the last click, but much more of the funnel so we can truly measure
socialâs part in any conversion. As the channel is now being used
increasingly as a discovery channel, knowing that it may have played a part at
the initial interaction stage can make your social numbers more reflective of
its true value.


Softer metrics


And then there are the âsofterâ metrics that should have monetary
values assigned to them. âLikesâ, comments, shares and impressions
should and can be tracked for GA easily now thanks to the _trackSocial method.
This feeds more info on that engagement through to your analytics reports so you
can better understand the value interaction brings.


Paid and organic


You can also separate out paid and organic social campaigns easily enough in
the same way you would within search by making use of the Google URL builder.
This allows you to create bespoke URLs for specific campaigns, allowing you to
measure everything from fan acquisition campaigns through to individual content
projects with ease.


Takeaways


Itâs clear then that the combination of changes to audience behavior, in
the way they discover new things, and socialâs increasing maturity as a
channel that âacceptsâ commercial content means a tipping point is
close.


Combine that with Googleâs current obsession with change and the channel
is becoming a serious option for those looking to vary traffic sources. And with
all the tools now in place and a mass of data available to inform our decision
making perhaps it is time to invest?


Top 5 Takeaways


Find a way of digging into your audienceâs social data and leverage that
information to understand them based on their interests. The more you know about
them the more effective your marketing will be.
Ensure that a thoroughly thought our content strategy sits at the heart of
those marketing efforts and powers your social channels. That strategy should
include ideas created from the above insight.
Test content types regularly based on engagement rates to refine your
strategy. That way you are not guessing what your audience wants to see.
Set up a thorough measurement strategy from the very start. That way you can
truly understand the value that social is bringing to your business; at every
point within the buying funnel.
And above all: Take social seriously. Itâs growing fast and with access
improving it really can become a primary traffic and revenue source for your
business!

And if you want to refer back to anything in this post we've created this eBook
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