Articles
How Content Analysis Can Change Your Whole Social Media Strategy
Posted on November 25, 2014
Taking steps in building a community and engaging on social media might seem hard when you don’t know if your actions are right or wrong. Is your audience responding to your strategy ? Are you finding the right people ? Establishing if the changes you made to your strategy are heading in the direction you’ve wanted means taking a look at your content analysis. But how does data determine what you should do next ?
What are we looking at?
When you want to report on your site’s social activity, you should focus on likes, +1, retweets. They are clear value that can be easily integrated in an algorithm. You should keep an eye on them, but remember they only measure a part of your impact, which is not your whole social activity. Taking a close look at the social aspect of content analysis will give you more information.
We all want to rank better in Google SERPs with our sites, but our main focus is, in fact, to bring more leads and convert them into clients. Remember we talked about conversions before as well? Having great social media management will bring more visitors directly to your site, before crawlers actually take it into consideration. So, what should we be looking at?
Analysing your social media presence
There are three aspects subtracted from content analysis, which can give you a great understanding of your social media presence:
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- How people see your site on social platforms
- Directing people to social components
- The overall impact of your activity
[image courtesy: Nic Price’s flickr]
How people see your site on social platforms
On different social sites there are many different ways content can appear. You need to make sure that your social information stands out as a format in the audience’s newsfeed. There is some key information taken from content analysis that can help you here.
- Find out if you have Twitter Cards. Twitter presents links from some sites with descriptions and images. This can happen for your site as well, if you tell Twitter how to interpret the information it receives from your site. It’s a simple tactic that can be finished in minutes and it will work out fine whenever someone shares a link to your site.
- Facebook OpenGraph protocol. This is a meta-tag that you need to put in place. Through it you allow other websites to become rich “graph” objects and to function as other Facebook objects. You control how information travels from a website to Facebook when you share a page, so it perceives images as images, titles as titles and descriptions as such.
- Meta-descriptions for each page. What content analysis can also point out is if the preview information is available for each page on your site. When people have already gotten to your articles, on your site the task becomes much simpler. You need to make sure that the content they find presenting your article is convincing and makes them click on it.
- Making sure that your images are the right size. As much as you’d like to have great big images that show in detail what you explain, in order for them to have an impact on social media as well, they need to be a certain dimension. As platforms evolve, dimensions can change slightly, so stay informed on the subject, especially if you are active on Google plus. You may want to use these free resources for images as well.
Directing people to social components
Rather than posting your articles on your own on social media, it’s better to get them posted by others, from outside your organization. The content analysis of your site can give you a helping hand in this situation as well. It’s your job to make it easy for the readers to give you social traction. Them recommending you is far more than just posting the article, it is them vouching for its quality.
So, how can you help them help you? The first step is to make sure you have social media buttons on your site. They need to appear on each blog article but there might also be landing pages that you wish people would share: compelling offers or maybe a clear to the point explanation of your services. Ensuring that they can make it with a simple click of the button will ensure that you have more shares.
Also check in your content analysis whether you have “follow me” buttons for all your social media accounts. This way you will be able to stay in touch with them. They will still receive information from your site and make it more likely for your followers to return. In many ways, this might be the first step in converting them, so make sure to also take the time to include calls to action towards them.
The overall impact of your activity
The simplest of metrics in this field is that of the countable social signals, such as likes, favorites and tweets. They are at the core of understanding what works and what doesn’t. I, for one, consider that comments reflect a higher level of engagement and place their quality and important metrics above their quantity.
Other indicators that need to be taken into consideration are the number of backlinks, which is in many cases connected to the way your articles spread on social media. The reach of the article and its value determine whether or not people mention it on their own sites. Having a constant look at the social media mentions of your brand’s name, site and authors is also a great measure of the social impact your site has.
Content Analysis giving depth to social activity
Taking a close look at your site from each angle will give you the answer to what you need to do to have a better social media activity. The real issues are in the details. They need to be straighten out from the beginning and then your strategy can scale a better, more convincing, content presentation.
There are many tools out there that can give you an overall idea of how well your site is doing, but a few will even provide the data you need for turning your site into an influential source. To gather your data you can use CAT: Content Analysis tool, ContentLook or you can do it manually. The important part is what you do afterwards.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/content-analysis-can-change-whole-social-media-strategy-01067299