Whenever I consult with a client about setting up a web site, I'm inevitably asked about how to use Twitter.com or Facebook.com in conjunction with their web site.  This is a big topic so I am going to break it up into a couple of parts.  First off, if you haven't read my thoughts on the difference between Facebook and Twitter, check out the following article.  These posts will build off of that basic understanding.  Let's frame a couple of ground rules for these posts.  If you don't fit into this scenario then this advice may or may not work for you.

  1. I'm mostly concerned with companies that want to drive traffic to their web site.
  2. The companies that I deal with, typically have one or more people that are the face of the company but still distinct from the company itself.
  3. This person being an expert or perceived as an expert in their field is very important to their careers and to the success of the company.
Examples that fit this bill would be accountants, lawyers, brokers, insurance agents and other professional services people.  Many of these people are self-employed individuals running a small company and need help getting on the web to drive new business.
 
Typically, the discussion starts with "I need a web site.", to which I ask "Why do you need a web site?" which most of the time results in "Uh ... umm ... Because I think it can make getting new business easier ...". At this point I'm shaking my head trying to figure out if I should tell this person to forget a web site or dive deeper into the education process that will need to happen for their web site to be a success.  Far too many times have I seen lots of cash dumped into a web site with less than stellar results and 99.9% of the time it is because the client had no idea what he/she was getting into.  The project was doomed to failure from the start.  I almost always tell them to forget Twitter and Facebook for now.  There's a huge learning curve that needs to be overcome first.
The number one indicator of a site's likely success to me, is do you know what you want to do with your web site. Build it and they will come DOES NOT WORK anymore. More likely it will end up as build it and watch it fail to get noticed amongst the thousands of competing web sites trying to do exactly the same thing. Let's assume that your web site is one of the rare sites with a plan and a purpose. You're miles ahead of your competition but if you're like everyone else, you went through this extended development time with your web site, churned out a massive amount of content to fill its pages and thought the release date was the finish line. You would be wrong like everyone else. The release date is the beginning and the work you do after the release date will make the work you did prior to it look small in comparison.
 
I'm intending to get to Twitter, Facebook and blogging but the background work here is more than I thought it would be so bear with me.  The only way you're going to be able to know if your web site is a success is if you can measure page views, hits and the impact of those hits on your bottom line.  Your site's success can be measured and it is the only sure way to know if it is helping you or draining your funds.  The beginning of this starts with good SEO practices.
  1. Meta keywords, meta descriptions and meta tags.  Every page should have them.  Every page on your site should have tags that ARE NOT GENERATED BY A TOOL.  A generation tool is a decent place to start, but Google and Bing can sniff out generated tags and will devalue pages that use them.  If you're thinking that organic page rankings and search hits are a large part of your site's potential success then spending the time to get this stuff right is well worth it.
  2. Page titles and Urls.  If you're using a content management system that still builds new page Urls with http://mydomain/article.aspx?id=1234 then you are killing your page rankings and need to find a new site provider.  All of your Urls should be formatted like http://mydomain/This-Is-The-Title.html.
  3. Sign up for Google Analytics or some service like it and get it functioning properly on your web site.
The next step is to measure the initial impact of your web site.  To do that you need to know a few things, the least of which is where they came from.  Every click and hit needs to be able to be traced back to a specific entry point to your site.  Hits will come from three places.
  1. Organic search traffic.  This happens when your page appears at the top of Google's search page and is clicked on by the user.  Analytics will report the search keywords which can then be added to your meta tags and keywords to further enhance your page rank for those words.
  2. Direct traffic.  Direct traffic is the result of typing in your web site address into a browser.  Direct traffic happens when users bookmark your site, get your site from the radio, newspaper or one of your business cards.  Effective use of landing pages can help determine where people are coming from with direct hits.
  3. Referring traffic.  Twitter, Facebook, your blog, other blogs and other web sites generate this traffic.  The web server records this information and Google's analytics code records referrers so that you can sort page hits.
Once you realize how people get to your site, the next step is to figure out how much it is costing you to get them to come to your site.  In my next installment, we'll discuss methods to do this.  Just getting to this point is often quite a challenge but you'll see that it is actually a simple concept once you strip away all the techno-jargon.  I usually know I hit home with a client when they realize that the web isn't much different from their other marketing campaigns such as newspapers and radio.  The web has its own unique aspects but in the end it gets measured exactly in the same manner that we would other sources.  In this way, it's much easier to predict success and compare web marketing to the campaigns you've been running all along.