February | 2014 |

Month: February 2014

What’s new? Meet the dashboard, deeper details, and audience shares

February 27, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Can’t say we didn’t warn you. We get daily feedback from the brands and agencies who rely on awe.sm to understand the value of their social media marketing — and others who just enjoy abusing our live-chat widget… — and we take it to heart.

awe.sm is constantly improving, and today we’re pretty excited to show off some of our newest stuff.

Dashboard professional

Considering how powerful awe.sm is, and how much data we can help you collect about your sharing, an obvious question is how to make sense of it all, and see at a glance how your social media marketing is performing. So meet the new awe.sm dashboard.

When you log into your awe.sm for Marketers account, you’ll now be presented with a glimpse of how everything comes together. How have all of your goal conversions performed? Which pieces of shared content performed best? What trends took place over time? Have you gained followers? Increased engagement?

The dashboard is intended to be quickly consumed — it’s the first web page I check every morning — to help you understand what works, and assess if anything merits deeper digging.

Deep, man

And speaking of digging deep…

Surely you already know that you can drill down to see the details of an individual social post — just click that orange magnifying glass. But now you can see those details rolled up to the level of each piece of shared content, too. We call it content details, but you can call it whatever you’d like (as long as you don’t call it Shirley). We bet it’ll be a big help.

For the first time, awe.sm now makes it easy to understand how each piece of content you share performs: the clicks it receives from each social network where you posted it, every social interaction that follows, the pageviews and conversions that result. The actionable data you get:

What should I post, and what does it get me?

All my child-shares

The whole point of sharing your content to social media is to start a conversation. As the marketing industry has learned, and we keep pointing out, a Tweet can incite a Pin, which leads to a Like, from which someone comments, then re-tweets.

Only awe.sm tracks multiple generations of sharing, across multiple social networks. Now, we show you the true impact of that sharing.

By flipping the Audience shares toggle, you now can see the pieces of content which your site visitors have shared — by using awe.sm-powered sharing buttons, or just by grabbing the link out of the address bar and sending it to their friends.

At a glance, you can see the content that’s shared the most, in addition to aggregated totals of those shares’ visits, pageviews, conversions, and re-shares.

When you drill down into the details of each piece of content you’ve shared or each individual social post, you’ll now see new totals that distinguish between “Parent” and “Child” shares. In other words, When I post, how many visits, pageviews, and conversions do my posts actually bring in?

What this means is, finally, it’s possible to completely quantify what you’ve long suspected: your social sharing goes far — really far — and creates value that well exceeds what directly comes from each post. Whether you’re a strategist trying to optimize your social marketing or an individual practitioner looking to justify her value to her CMO, this visibility is indispensable, and unmatched.

Now what?

At this point, clearly we ought to take a nap with the Corgi, but improbably enough we’ve got more in the hopper.

If you’re already sold, ping us for a demo. If you’re interested in watching awe.sm continue to innovate in bringing visibility, measurability, accountability, and optimization to social media marketing, well, stay tuned.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

You’re so awe.sm and you don’t even know it.

While you’ve been digging yourself out of the snow again — and again — and again — awe.sm’s continued to make it easier to power, measure, and optimize your social media marketing funnel. Since we launched awe.sm for Marketers this summer, we’ve worked closely with our customers to make refinements, add features, and make marketers’ lives easier.

With enhancements added daily, and some more exciting ones coming up soon, now’s a good time to step back and check in on our high-level features.

Fundamentally, awe.sm works by powering trackable social sharing, bringing visibility to how this sharing contributes to your marketing funnel, and providing insights you can use to improve your efforts and maximize your ROI.

How? Glad you asked…

Make lots of links.

The backbone of awe.sm is creating short, customized tracking links for activity you share across your social channels. For example, if you’re sharing a blog post to three social networks — Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, say… — awe.sm will make three links, one for each channel. This is different from how a link shortener works, and it makes it possible to break out the clicks, pageviews, and business results that come from each network.

Our dead-simple link creator and site tools automate the process of creating new links and keeping track of where they go and how they’re used, to give you powerful visibility into what works.

Track conversions.

Conversion tracking has been a staple of web analytics for as long as there’s been a web. awe.sm brings closed-loop attribution to social media marketing, too.

Define custom conversion goals that match your business’s KPIs — sales, registrations, video views, app downloads … anything that matters to you — and track how much of each result from every social post. This makes it possible to track the ROI of social in dollars and cents, not just in Likes and Retweets.

Identify top performers.

It’s easy to use awe.sm’s reporting tool to slice and dice on every dimension.

Want to compare how different shared content performs? See which pieces of content drive engagement and earn conversions, so you can optimize your content strategy.

Want to find people who amplify your message and share it with their followers? Track the shares created by each site visitor to see what they share, measure the impact they create, and connect with them directly to reward them or ignite their engagement.

Track virality.

Track social media marketing’s elusive rainbow unicorn: the source of “virality”. Your Tweet drives my Facebook share, which drives my boss’s Pin, which leads to a conversation on Disqus, and his friend’s purchase — so awe.sm tracks multiple generations of sharing across multiple channels.

When you have visibility into how your posts perform, how content is re-shared throughout your community, and how that sharing contributes to your goals, then you can grab the unicorn by the horn.

Capture all of your visitors’ sharing.

When was the last time you clicked a share button? … No? Us neither. So awe.sm doesn’t just track the sharing your visitors perform with your sharing buttons, we also capture what happens when a visitor grabs your page’s link out of their address bar.

It shouldn’t surprise you that social conversations unfold across IMs, emails, comments, and more — but it might surprise you to know that this kind of sharing happens almost ten times more frequently than anyone clicks a share button. If you’re not tracking this, you don’t understand what’s going on.

But wait — there’s more!

Don’t even get us started … well, okay, you already did. But if you’re interested in learning more, geeking out with analytics nerds, and checking things out, let’s get in touch.

*Originally posted on the awe.sm blog

5 ways to score with your social media strategy this Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

As everyone knows, February 14 commemorates the Roman Empire’s murder of Valentinus of Terni — twice: when Emperor Claudius Gothicus’ original sentence of death by clubbing and stoning somehow didn’t do the trick, he was re-sentenced to beheading outside the Flaminian Gate, and this worked. (That’s amore.)

Of course, if you choose to focus instead on St. Valentine’s work as a matchmaker this February 14th, then you know there’s no better time of year to review your social media marketing strategy through a romantic lens. Based on our work measuring and optimizing the performance of social media marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands, here are some simple steps to help you get your leads to say “I do” — without even overpaying for chocolates.

Go long

Just as with real life, there’s nothing stopping you from using social media to score some fleeting romance … but Mardi Gras isn’t for another month, and Valentine’s Day is more commonly associated with finding true love. The smart marketer aspires to acquire and retain customers for the long haul. Social can do more than generate interest for your brand: with proper planning and careful execution, your social campaign can actually lay the groundwork for a mutually fulfilling, committed relationship.

DTR

If you have only a fuzzy notion of what you want out of your social media marketing, you’ll get fuzzy results, so ask yourself in advance, What do I want out of this? Many brands stop at the mere flirtation of Likes and Retweets, but you can — and should — engage customers with an actual business goal in mind and an ROI to measure against. Your goal doesn’t have to be a transaction: it could be a coupon download, webinar registration, mailing list signup, or video view. But know in advance what you’re pursuing. This will guide you as you create your social content and plan your execution.

Emulate this guy

Giacomo Girolamo Casanova planned his dates like you wouldn’t believe. Entire books have been written about the Casanova method: complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes, coupled with meticulous attention to small details, all engineered to overwhelm his beloved with excitement, gratitude, and infatuation.

First of all, think about that the next time you spend 4 minutes lining something up on OpenTable while concurrently brushing your teeth. More importantly, consider every element of your marketing funnel as part of a courtship to win over your customers.

Beyond the superficial charm of a witty Tweet, does your site’s user experience surprise and delight your visitors? Do your copy and interaction design help guide them to a more fulfilling conversion? Do your visitors find content worth sharing, and feel invited to engage more deeply? Like Casanova, script every element of your interactions to attract your prospects to commit. Nowhere does the old adage about failing to plan is planning to fail ring more true.

Pay attention

We don’t recommend going on a date without making eye contact — did he like the wine I picked?, is there something in my teeth?, was that story about my mom funny?… — and you shouldn’t fly blind with social media marketing, either.

When it comes to tortured romantic metaphors, think of social media marketing less like a flock of doves you release once and watch take to the sky, and more like a moonlit gondola which you continue to steer down the canals. The tools now exist to monitor every post from the moment it goes out, and not just the Likes or Retweets it gets out on the social networks, but the site visits, pageviews, and funnel conversions that result. Use this feedback to adjust and optimize over the course of the campaign.

If a given social network or a given style of content performs better, don’t be afraid to switch things up. On one recent campaign, an awe.sm customer launched with the intention of relying heavily upon influencer tweets, but less than a week in realized that earned social posts attracted more valuable traffic, so they quickly upped the size of their share buttons. Don’t be afraid to switch things up and do more of what works — just like those killer stories about Mom.

Be yourself

Keep your messaging true to your brand voice, and be transparent about your intentions. You can only truly love those who love you back, so pre-qualify your customers by accurately representing the value you provide. If you steer clear of gimmicks or gotchas, those who engage with your content, visit your site, and proceed down your funnel stand the best chance of converting into a life-long fulfilling relationship … or at least a happy customer.

Love is a battlefield, so suit up. This Valentine’s Day, you’ve got this, you old heartbreaker, you.