09 Jun Social Community Conversion Optimization
I just got back from SMX Advanced and my mind is rolling. A lot of the sessions were based off of traditional SEM practices, however every once in a while you heard the inklings of social media influence and the semantic web. A sign of things to come in my opinion, and shows you how the two practices are rolling into one holistic approach to marketing on the web.
One of the panels I sat in on was “Conversion Optimization: Winning after they arrive”. It was some atypical talk about conversions, multivariate testing, and so forth. However while sitting through it I got to thinking. When discussing conversions, the typical stance has been related to increasing some sort of lead generation. However, since the social web is amongst us, it will only continue to grow it will be ever increasingly important to optimize interaction.
When I say interaction, I mean interaction and sharing of data inside a network, community or website. I think we will see new tools, tactics, and best practices come out of this new subset of conversion optimization.
If I were going to optimize a social network I would start with the following 5 metrics:
- Average # of Comments per user
- Average # of Internal Emails per user
- Average # of Friends per user
- Average # of Profile views per user
- Rate at which users return back to the website
Certainly there are other metrics that you would want to keep an eye on when optimizing, however most of the functions above are found in most networks.
The major problem in doing all this is the fact many of these things cannot be compiled without integrating a custom analytics solution. Most of the major analytics packages do not offer a way to analyze this data (with exception to a couple of the metrics).
Can you think of other integral metrics to monitor when optimizing your community?
