Google Adds More Reasons For Your Website To Go Social
May 16th, 2012 Posted in B2B sales lead generation, Social Media
by: Jan Loyola
How is your social media b2b lead generation campaign going so far? Is your sales and marketing team still having difficulty measuring social media metrics? Is your boss still doubtful of the benefits of social media marketing? Here’s more reasons to help your boss see the value of your company’s online social interactions and more helpful tools for your sales and marketing team (just in case they aren’t using it yet.)
Aside from high quality content, Google is also pushing to measure a website or webpage’s authority by looking into activities from the social media aspect. Likes, tweets, and +1s now carry weight on how your site will rank on Google search engines. However, this doesn’t mean that you can just go about and collect hundreds of thousands of likes. No, on the contrary, Google is looking more for quality rather than quantity for this metric. Having a hundred regular Tom, Dick and Harry’s tweeting about your web page may have as much effect on your Google ranking as a quarter of the weight of TechCrunch or Mashable liking the same page. Essentially, Google is looking at these social metrics in the same way that they view links.
Here are apparent factors to be optimized that help affect Google rankings:
- Type of search engine optimization used on the site and its pages.
- Relevance and amount of all incoming links.
- Quality of content.
- Quality and amount of likes, tweets (and retweets), +1s.
This is a wakeup call to all businesses who have a website but do not believe in the “power” of social media. These popular online hangouts do not just help with b2b lead generation through social media campaigns, but by having a substantial figure from your niche industry like, tweet or +1 your webpage, you can rest assured that your online presence is taken up a notch in the search results.
How can you measure the impact of social activity to your website? Google has conveniently provided a Social Plugin Analytics tool that will measure various factors pertaining to your social marketing campaign. The tool gives you insight into:
- Sources - measures where the traffic flowing into your site comes from and the engagement that they undertook. These metrics include pageviews, average visit duration and pages/visit.
- Conversions - quantifies the value of a social visit and the monetary value of each conversion from the various social networks linking to your site.
- Pages - specific view of the social engagement metrics for each of your pages.
- Social plugins – allow you to track which of your pages are shared on which networks.
It’s amazing how Google makes everything so convenient for businesses who are keen on using their tools (but perhaps also a tad bit worrisome when you realize that everything you do online is affected by Google). Now, if only they’d create a tool to help businesses ease the process of b2b appointment setting, everything would be peachy.
