With the right tools, and an intelligent strategy, any business can develop market research from the information found across social media sites. Continue reading to learn about using social media as a tool for getting to know customers to a whole new extent.

Define the Marketing Goals

The first step for any type of market research is to determine exactly what is trying to be learned. That could mean looking for insights into things like consumer behavior, marketplace sentiment, product research, brand awareness, and more.

A brand also has to determine whether to go looking for information that is qualitative or quantitative. Quantitative research is essentially the hard numbers: The number of followers on a specific platform or social media mentions. Qualitative research is more associated with feelings: whether people have positive or negative feelings about something.

As an example, a business might find that it has 500 mentions on a specific platform. That would be quantitative information. With a deeper look at the numbers, it may be found that 91 percent of those mentions rate as positive. That would be qualitative information. They can decide which will be the focus of a research strategy in order to gain the specific customer insights.

Choose a Platform

Once a goal has been defined and the type of information determined as to what’s being sought after, a marketer can select a social media platform to mine for information. Depending on the goals or the group of consumers that they are trying to learn more about, some social networks might hold more research value.

Due to the ubiquitous nature of Facebook, it is the social network that offers value for the broadest range of goals, but other social media sites might be able to offer unique insights for specific groups. As an example, Snapchat advertising offers the greatest access to the millenial demographic, and is noteworthy for its high engagement levels.

Use the Right Tools

When it comes to extracting data from social media, digital marketers have an array of different tools at their disposal. These analytics platforms mine information like mentions, likes, and shares to provide businesses with insights into the behaviors and feelings of social media users.

When a brand is looking for an analytics platform, they want to find one that has the ability to extract the information that is relevant to their consumer insight research. They must consider the type of information that the service provides, and look at the different ways that it allows them to collect, manage, and clean data.

Using the Data

The point of market research is to obtain information that a business can turn into action. They might be able to use it for marketing, product development, customer service or any number of other business goals. Marketers shouldn’t just gather this information and sit on it – they should take action and make decisions that can refine the brand and maximize their ROI.

A company that offers a software-as-a-service product might find that customers are unsatisfied with a specific feature, or they might find that a competitor offers a feature that is particularly popular with consumers. This information can then be used to refine the product going forward.

Things like surveys and focus groups still have their place in market research, but social media can provide customer insights that are not available through traditional methods. Marketers can get information from a much larger group, and research can be performed much more quickly and for a lower cost. That means it offers a better return on investment, and the immediacy of the information makes it more useful and more actionable.

Written by: Rae Steinbach, Taktical Digital (via Website Magazine)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How to Use Social Media to Know What Customers Want appeared first on CueCamp.

HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.

Google’s push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found 24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS

In addition to the security offered (which we’ll discuss below), there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.

1. More referrer data

Whenever traffic passes from a secure site to a non-secure site, the referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from.

If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.

As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.

2. HTTPS as a rankings boost

On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to remain quiet small.

In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.

Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.

In fact, don’t expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:

14 SEO activities more impactful than HTTPS:

3. Security and privacy

Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from SSL encryption.

HTTPS adds security in several ways:

• HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
• Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
• HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

My advice is this: Make the switch if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

Challenges to overcome with HTTPS

1. Mistakes happen

Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It’s easy to overlook important details.

• Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
• Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
• Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That’s the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)

While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.

In most cases it’s a simple fix, but beware the risk.

2. Speed issues

Because HTTPS requires extra communication “handshakes” between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.

Add to this the fact that speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.

The good news is, if you follow best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.

3. Costs

Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That’s a significant amount for small websites. It’s also a barrier that most spammers won’t bother with.

On the other hand, it’s completely possible to switch to HTTPS for free.

4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS

Sometimes, things don’t play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated Open Site Explorer just this year.)

If you run AdSense, you may see your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.

Even Google’s own Webmaster Tools doesn’t yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.

Growing number of sites using HTTPS

Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.

Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.

According to the latest statistics from BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.

SEO and HTTPS best practices

This post talks about the SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we’d recommend:

• Moving Your Website to HTTPS / SSL
• Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free
• HTTPS for WordPress
• How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.

John Mueller of Google has stated that Google doesn’t care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.

From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.

SEO checklist to preserve your rankings

• Make sure every element of your website uses HTTPS, including widgets, java script, CSS files, images and your content delivery network.
• Use 301 redirects to point all HTTP URLs to HTTPS. This is a no-brainer to most SEOs, but you’d be surprised how often a 302 (temporary) redirect finds its way to the homepage by accident
• Make sure all canonical tags point to the HTTPS version of the URL.
• Use relative URLs whenever possible.
• Rewrite hard-coded internal links (as many as is possible) to point to HTTPS. This is superior to pointing to the HTTP version and relying on 301 redirects.
• Register the HTTPS version in both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to ensure Google can properly crawl and render your site.
• Update your sitemaps to reflect the new URLs. Submit the new sitemaps to Webmaster Tools. Leave your old (HTTP) sitemaps in place for 30 days so search engines can crawl and “process” your 301 redirects.
• Update your robots.txt file. Add your new sitemaps to the file. Make sure your robots.txt doesn’t block any important pages.
• If necessary, update your analytics tracking code. Most modern Google Analytics tracking snippets already handle HTTPS, but older code may need a second look.
• Implement HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). This response header tells user agents to only access HTTPS pages even when directed to an HTTP page. This eliminates redirects, speeds up response time, and provides extra security.
• If you have a disavow file, be sure to transfer over any disavowed URLs into a duplicate file in your new Webmaster Tools profile.

Tips for FeedBurner and RSS

Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn’t compatible with HTTPS.

If you use FeedBurner, you’ll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you’re technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a very inexpensive RSS migration solution.

Migrating social share counts

When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.

These counts don’t impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it’s frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here’s a list of what does and doesn’t eventually transfer over:

• Facebook: Yes
• Twitter: No
• Google +1s: Yes
• Google shares: No
• LinkedIn: Yes
• Pinterest: No

If you want instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content.

Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>

Keep in mind: This only displays social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn’t update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares.

If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.

Making the leap

Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.

Will you make the switch to HTTPS?

Written by: Cyrus Shepard, Moz
Posted by: CueCamp

The post The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website appeared first on CueCamp.

Our view on social’s role in content marketing is threefold:

1. Social should play a key role in informing content strategy
2. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn and so on are all valid platforms that should be used as part of your content strategy
3. Social media (particularly Facebook) has a unique ability to amplify your content placed on other channels

Social Media’s Role In Informing Content Strategy

Social data is an absolute core component of creating a content strategy. From deciding what to create content about, to the weighting of that content within your overall plan, the data you can pull from social should be integral to your thoughts.

There’s a whole host of great tools you can use to get insight in-house, such as:

– Followerwonk: Followerwonk allows you to analyse any Twitter audience by age, location, and bio word clouds to give you a flavour of your audience. Combine this with the most influential followers and see who they are and what you do to give yourself a headstart

– Unmetric: Unmetric allows you to track your competitors social media content and get alerted when there are spikes in engagement levels, allowing you to react or use historical data to plan future activity

– Twtrland: this tool allows you to delve into the Twitter data of any profile to see their most influential tweets, top followers, and basic demographics

We use a mixture of these tools, and some of our own data sets to really understand a target audience in advance of planning content. Outputs from various tools are used as part of the idea creation process, such as this Followerwonk word cloud of the bios of @datifyuk followers for instance:

Or this Socialbakers data based on the top Facebook interests by market, and the age split of people interested in Bollywood in New Zealand:

When you start adding of all of this data into the mix you can start to take intelligent decisions about your content marketing to make it more effective and relevant for your target audience.

Use Social Platforms As Part Of Your Content Strategy

Many brands will see their content strategy as having two sides, on-page (website), and off-page (guest posting/outreach led). Social often gets missed as a crucial part in between. Not only can social help you identify who to outreach to, but should be used as a platform for your content to drive engagement with your brand.

Your Facebook or Twitter updates should form part of your overall content strategy, and tailoring your content across various channels with a focus on social will always be beneficial. In Moz’s recent search rankings factor survey the majority of search marketers surveyed felt that social signals, and in particular the overall influence of Google +1’s on rankings would continue to increase in the future, again showing why social channels should be integrated into your strategy now.

Regardless of which channel works best for you, having a presence across each is important, even if only to own your brand name and keep people aware of you across their chosen channels. Google Plus is a good example of this – the users numbers are high, but interaction levels generally low (outside of the digital marketing community!). However, due to the increased importance Google are likely to place on this as a ranking factor for your content and therefore your site it is crucial that you keep this channel burning with your social content even if only with a few updates a week of content amended from another platform such as Facebook.

Amplify Your Content

Where social really can benefit your content marketing efforts is in putting your content in front of new audiences that are highly relevant and ready to engage. Whether your social audience is big or small, with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn you can now amplify your content through native paid means to reach new audiences at a relatively low cost compared to other channels.  At Datify, we do this for nearly every piece of content we create to ensure that reach is good when our clients have invested.

What’s more, the targeting across all three of these channels is very detailed, with Facebook in particular having multiple targeting levels that can enable you to find your perfect audience in this environment. This can enable you to create an initial buzz around your content, or keep traffic sustained after the initial outreach push.

Being able to target people who engage in other topics in your niche, who are in the right location and the right age grouping is a great opportunity, and can be very cost effective if managed correctly.

Whilst Matt Cutts has denied Facebook and Twitter’s social sharing signals are included as major ranking factors, they are still important as part of your content marketing efforts. Driving increased traffic to the content you create not only generates social shares, but also has the impact of creating ‘earned’ links, brand interactions and the potential for new business.

Facebook is particularly strong for amplifying your content. By using Power Editor you can ensure that your content is only seen in relevant News Feeds of the exact type of person you want to be viewing your content.

Summary

In summary, don’t think of social media as a completely separate discipline to content marketing – in fact, don’t separate the two at all. Social media should be completely integrated into everything you do – from informing your overall strategy, to being included as a platform to think about, and to increasing the distribution of your content.

Embrace social, particularly the paid amplification piece, to ensure that you can drive content marketing success for your clients.

Written by: Ben Harper, socialmedia today
Posted by: CueCamp

The post The Role of Social Media in Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on CueCamp.

1. You will find whomever you want to do business with somewhere online
2. You will find whatever knowledge you need about any market or any person online
3. You can reach your market by simply engaging in the right conversations with the right people. This is more effective than advertising.
4. If your business can’t be found, isn’t engaging with the market or worse yet ignoring the market you are not likely to be creating transactional opportunities while your competition does.
5. Communications is a system to leverage your organizations ability to communicate with your market. Social media is the new communications system.
6. Social media saves time and money if you use it right for the right things
7. If you learn “how” to use social media correctly then you’ll understand “what” your market is looking for and “where” they are looking. You’d want them to look for you.
8. “When” your customers and prospects are engaging about you, your industry or your products and services you need to be there listening. Otherwise how will you gain the necessary market intelligence, be enabled to respond or even be aware of problems or needs. If you are not present when and where the conversations are occurring you are basically out of touch with your market.
9. Communications is about reach. Communicating is about relational dynamics between people. Social media provides the means to effectively communicate with your market. However communicating in human rather than institutional terms.
10. If you are not communicating (listening first, initiating second) then how in the world do you expect to create relationship with people and businesses that may want the value you offer?

When people need or want something in the old days they’d look up information in the yellow pages. Today people turn to search engines to find what they want or need. Each day on average Google gets used 235 million times.

When people are looking to purchase something they want and need more and more they are going on line to find out what other people think or say about a product, service or brand. The relevancy that influences people’s buying behavior is other people’s conversation, including yours. That is if they can find your conversation and if it provides value people are looking for.

To sum up: For many, the Web isn’t a place to look for information, it’s the only place.

Written By: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted By: CueCamp

The post The Real Reasons Why To Use Social Media appeared first on CueCamp.