Social Media Marketing and Brand Health Check

Hi everyone, I’m back with this week’s post. Today, I’m going to make you aware about Social Media Marketing and also I would like to explain how to do a Social Media Brand Health Check for a selected brand.

So, let’s get started. When you hear the word social media, you would probably think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr or even Pinterest and even you would be a member of more than one of them. Well, social media includes all of them and all provide us with platforms to communicate with each other 24/7. All of them allow us to create, share and exchange information in virtual communities and networks.

By taking it into another level, marketers advertised their products on them with the intention of creating conversations about their brands. That is how Social Media Marketing (SMM) becomes a way of life for us. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. 

Facebook has the highest penetration among the top social media entities, measured by the number of people having profiles on a social media site. It’s common to see that almost all businesses in the world is having a Facebook fan page to build one to one conversations with the customers regarding their products and services.

Social Media Brand Health Check is a very good method to evaluate the social media presence of a particular brand among the competitors. Even though it takes a bit of time, the information we are getting are totally worth for it. By doing a Brand Health Check for your brand, you could identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing competitors, potential competitors and finally you could decide how to balance out the social media platforms. For an example, (in Sri Lankan context) if your brand is targeting more towards high end customers, it’s worth to interact through Twitter rather than Facebook because, majority of Twitter users are belong to that category.

Anyway, to demonstrate a Brand Health Check, I chose my brand as Keells Super and the competing brand as Cargills Food City. Now we have to analyse the social presence of these two based on following criteria.

• Reach: How many people you could reach through various social media platforms?
• Quality of Audience: Are the people you reached, belong to the relevant target audience?
• Engagement: How intensely people engage with your brand?
• Share of Voice: How often people talk about your brand?
• Sentiment: Both positive and negative things people talk about your brand

Well, to work this out, I have to indicate the level of agreement based on the results I've found. The agreement levels are as follows:

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

So, following table shows the criteria and the level of satisfaction I came across after surfing through the net.

Well, you might wonder how to interpret the score that calculated at the bottom right corner of the table. So here are the guidelines to do that.

If Your Score is Below 25

You are seriously in 'Social Media Trouble'. You need to speed up your adaptation to the new media landscapes. You need to prioritize your social media goals, and start strengthening at least a few areas from the criterion used in above health check

If Your Score is from 26 to 50

There can be a few areas where you are really strong on Social Media. Find out those few areas and make them stronger and maintain. Find out the areas where you are weak, and address the issues

If Your Score is from 51 to 80

You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. However, there can be few areas where you can strengthen your presence.

If your Score is Above 81

Your brand rocks on Social Media! Keep it up, and continue monitoring new developments

As you can see, the score for Keells Super is 79.54% according to my level of satisfaction for the above criteria. That means, Keells Super is comparatively a successful brand when it comes to social presence, but have to improve in certain areas. Keells Super's Facebook and Twitter fan count is way better than Cargills. They are constantly updating posts, statuses and even various competitions compared to Cargills. One thing that they should develop is the numbers of followers in Twitter. In Sri Lanka, majority of Twitter account holders belong to high end tier. Since, Keells is also targeting them, it would be more appropriate. Other than the Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, Keells is active only on Foursquare and LinkedIn. I think that they should expand the ways of reaching customers in other possible social media platforms as well. Number of local fans are bit less for Keells compared with Cargills. But this can be justified because Keells is having an online supermarket (First online supermarket in Sri Lanka), and all products are open to be purchased by anyone across the globe. Even negative comments are less compared to Cargills. So basically, I think Keells is doing great compared to Cargills. Hope you'd agree with me as well. Just select one organization and identify competitors to do a brand health check. Just try and see :)

How to do a keyword research?

How an organization make use of a keyword research

In my previous blog post, I talked about SEO and how to make your website appear in top of organic search results. Well, that is only a part of SEO. The other part is PPC (Pay Per Click) or Paid Advertising. It simply means that the advertiser or the client should pay an agreed amount to the publisher (mainly a website owner) based on the clicks/views of the advertisement. Basically, the advertiser should be able to create an effective advertisement to be appeared on webpages based on the keyword research. Google Adwords is one such tool that allows you to do an effective keyword research plus create advertisements. Search marketing is now has a growing trend in developing countries and many business organizations could get the benefit out of it.

So let’s see how an online clothing shop, “Kelly Felder - online store” could be benefited by running a keyword search. As I mentioned above, this could be easily done through Google Adwords.

·

• First, in order to find Keywords, you should create a Google account.

• Then you have to create an Adword account by clicking the following link http://www.google.com/adwords/.

• In “word or Phrase” tab, type your desired keyword. In my case, since I'm conducting a keyword research for Kelly Felder Online Store, I typed “online clothing shops Sri Lanka”. Basically I needed to find out how what are words or phrases used by majority when searching for online clothing shops.

• Then the following results appeared. Since we don’t need all the keywords, I only selected 12. Then we could copy it to a excel spreadsheet for your convenience. Trust me, it’ll be really helpful when creating Advertisements.

• Then go to “Campaigns” and click “New Campaign” to create the PPC advertisements to appear in Search feeds. You could select any option according to your need.

• After that, you could add a campaign name, locations, budget etc and click on “Save and continue” at the end.

• Now, it’s time to create the content of the advertisement. You could see 5 separate lines to insert headline of the ad, descriptions and URLs. I added following details for Kelly Felder.

• You could also add keywords from the excel spreadsheet you prepared before. Then after filling the required information, click to bill the amount.

Well, that’s how you could create an ad by doing a keyword research. Actually online business owners could get a lot out PPC advertisements. One of the major advantages of pay per click advertising is that you don’t have to make any changes in your web pages just to rank high on the search engines. Kelly Felder online store is popular in overseas as well. Therefore, having ads in Google would be very helpful.

Another advantage of pay per click advertising is that the process you will have to go through is so simple. As I mentioned the important steps above, any organization could reap the harvest soon from their businesses. And you will just have to pay a fee and instantly your advertisements are up and running. Yes, it’s that simple. And further, you’re only paying for “Actual Visitors”. This could even control the cost of advertising since you’re only paying for the visitors who’re actually interested in products and services.

Well, PPC is truly a good strategy to reach your genuine customers but it takes experience and time to be successful. So, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you find this helpful. Please feel free to leave a comment.

A memorable lecture on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here goes my 3^rd blog post on “Anu’s Online Journal”. Specially, I would like to dedicate this blog post to Mr. Amitha who made the first move to carry out a web based lecture and to Mr. Suranga who conducted the lecture through web, from Sydney, Australia. Same as my colleagues in the Department, that was my first experience in a web based lecture. I’m glad that I was a part of it and I’m sure all my colleagues would agree with me. Anyway, on my very first web based lecture, I learnt about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Now I’m going to brief you what I’ve learnt.

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results”

Well, that is how Wikipedia has defined SEO. But I’m quite sure that no one would ever digest that by reading that definition. That’s why I thought of briefing SEO from the things I’ve learnt in my first web based lecture.

In simple, SEO can be seen as a process of getting traffic for a particular website from the “organic” or “natural” ways on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. This is totally free even though people could advertise their own website by paying a certain amount to a search engine. Remember, it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results.

For an example: I typed “web pages” in Google search engine and below screen shot shows how the search results appeared. The area highlighted by the red colour rectangle shows the paid search results (pay per click - PPC) and the area highlighted by blue colour rectangle shows the organic or natural search results based on the number of visitors.

Well, I hope you would be interested to rank your website on the top of the search results without paying a single penny to anyone. Therefore, I would be telling you 5 easy ways to do that. Okay, let’s start.

1. Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the possiblility of a web site or its contents to be crawled or “indexed” by a search engine. Crawlability is also known as Spiderability and Indexability. A Crawler is a special type of program that visits web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "spider" or a "bot." In order to make your website crawlable, you should make more meaningful URLs to all the pages in our website otherwise your web site would be ranked way below the first page of search results making it difficult to the users to visit.

2. Key Words

A keyword is any word or short phrase that describes a website or a page. Keywords aren't just keywords; every keyword, phrase and variation has its own audience. There may be a bigger audience for ‘black dresses’ rather than ‘black dress.’ If you want to attract more visitors to your website obviously you should use strong keywords in your website titles and website text. Therefore, you have to do a research to identify the key words that the visitors had used. You can use various types of tools available in World Wide Web to identify the main keywords used. “Google AdWords” a keyword finder that can be used to increase your website’s SEO.

3. Content Building

Content building can be considered as the heart of Digital Marketing. If the content of your website is irrelevant, nobody will ever visit again. In order to compete with other the websites which are having same content, you should find a way to make your website unique and outstanding. Your website’s home page which is also known as a landing page is the first thing that your potential customer sees after clicking on a link. Because you don’t have much time to convince them this is the right place, ensure there is an easy way to purchase your product or sign up for something as soon as possible. Make sure the design is clean, insightful and easy to navigate so that they can take action right away.

4. Add social media links

Almost all business now owns a social media account to keep in touch with customers and

potential customers. If your business has a Facebook page or other social media accounts, find out how many users are visiting your website through these social networks. Available in Google Analytics, the Network Referral report shows you how many people have visited your website through a social network. Is your Facebook audience visiting your website? If so, you are more likely to turn social network visitors into customers. An audience of loyal readers will link to and share your content naturally spreading positive word of mouth about your business or products. Building a social media presence would be only appropriate if the target audience of your business matches with those of social media communities.

5. Viral Content (Videos and Images)

Having viral videos or images with appropriate ALT tags will automatically boost the SEO of your website. ALT tags are very important because crawlers read only those and include them

in the search results. Most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap which is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It can be submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools. You should make sure to optimize your video with important key phrases or keywords. Don't use complicated words or terminology that may not be common to the average person. Get on your social networks, look through your email contacts, write on your blogs, and get the hype going. Share your video with everyone, because if you have content worth sharing, it will continue to be shared to grow an expanding audience, and in turn develop more exposure for your brand or service.

There are numerous best practices for optimizing your website and be ranked in the top of search results. Feel free to share your tips on SEO in terms of comments. Well, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you’ll find this information useful :)

Applying 25-point website usability checklist on "www.anything.lk"

I’m quite sure that you’ve visited uncountable number of websites in your lifetime. Some of them are easy to deal with, while some of them are very very cumbersome to even go through. From my second blog post, I would be critically analyzing a Sri Lankan website based on the 25-point website usability checklist developed by “user effect”. The website I chose for my analysis is www.anything.lk.

I thought of starting my analysis by giving you a brief introduction about Anything.lk. Needless to say that Anything.lk is Sri Lanka’s leading daily deal site which was launched in June 2011. Now it is the largest and No.1 daily deal site having more than 150,000 visitors per day. Anything.lk took a smart move to diversify from the daily deals market, which they control like 90% of, to e-commerce, as well as events, travel, lingerie and delivering Litro gas. They are giving big discounts such as over 50% to potential customers while for the merchants who offer products or services, it’s an opportunity to attract new customers who they hope will return after a satisfying first experience. According to the information available on December 2012, they have an e-mail database of over 280,000, more than 185,000 Facebook Fans and 30,000 regular buyers with over 60,000 deals sold.

Now it’s time to analyze it using 25-point website usability checklist. I’ll be analyzing it point by point for your convenience. The 25 point checklist is divided into 4 roughly equal sections, namely Accessibility, Identity, Navigation, and Content. Well, let’s start.

Accessibility

1.   Site load‐time is reasonable: Load time of Anything.lk is fairly reasonable when it compared with other daily deal sites such as http://www.lancoupon.lk, http://www.dailydeals.lk/ and http://www.wow.lk/

2.   Adequate text‐to‐background contrast: If you visit Anything.lk, you could see that it has white text in black background. Those 2 colours are very contrasting and could view the text clearly.

3.   Font size/spacing is easy to read: Headings are in slightly big font compared to the details in the advertisements. Even the price after the discount is clearly showed in yellow in the dark grey background. Spacing is also fine.

4.   Flash & add‐ons are used sparingly: No flash or add-ons are used in Anything.lk.

5.   Images have appropriate ALT tags: When you move the cursor on top of each deal (without clicking) you could see a small description of that particular deal and it helps to digest it within a few seconds.

6.   Site has custom not‐found/404 page: A customized page is available.

Identity

7.   Company logo is prominently placed: As you can see, company logo is placed on the   upper left corner of the page in white font with a blue outline. I think it’s identifiable very without difficulty.

8.   Tagline makes company’s purpose clear: Well, in this case, I don’t see a tagline in Anything.lk. But from the tabs placed in the upper strip of the page such as daily deals, Store, Events, Travel and etc, we could clearly identify that it’s a page having daily deals.

9.   Home‐page is digestible in 5 seconds: Of course, it is. It has 3 deals in a horizontal row having around 24 deals altogether divided by the sections such as daily deals, events, travel, store, big heart, Litro gas and book store.

10. Clear path to company information: It has a clear path to company information, but the link is placed on the bottom of the page. It would have been better if they could place it on top of the page.

11. Clear path to contact information: Same goes with the contact information as it is placed on the bottom of the page. But in the middle of the page, when you scroll down you’ll see a tab dedicated to “customer support” saying; For queries beyond office hours, weekends and holidays, kindly email us at support@anything.lk.

Navigation

12. Main navigation is easily identifiable: Main navigation is so easy as the main tabs namely, Daily deals, Store, Events, Travel, WOW Mall, Gas and Books are placed visibly on the top strip of the page. Even in the bottom of the page, tabs such as Company, Help, Follow us, Other, Global Partner, brands of the credit cards they’re accepting and mobile payment method are clearly shown.

13. Navigation labels are clear & concise: The above mentioned tabs in the upper strip are labeled properly in white font in the black and grey background. Tabs in the bottom of the page are in blue colour and having logos of all credit cards they’re accepting plus with the mobile partner.

14. Number of buttons/links is reasonable: Yes it is. There are only 7 buttons/tabs in the upper strip of the page as I mentioned above. When it comes to deals shown, the summary of each deal is shown precisely and if you want to know more about a particular deal, there’s a button called “View Deal” at the end of each deal.

15. Company logo is linked to home‐page: This is also yes. When you’re navigating through deals and if you suddenly want to go to the home page, just a single click on the company logo which is at the top left of the page would take you to the home page soon.

16. Links are consistent & easy to identify: There are links for each and every category (Daily deals, Store, Events, Travel, WOW Mall, Big Heart, Gas and Books) as well as for each and every deal. There are also links for the Anythink.lk facebook fan page and the news in Daily Mirror.

17. Site search is easy to access: Well, in this case, a tab called “site search” is not in Anything.lk. I think it’s a drawback here.

Content

18. Major headings are clear & descriptive: As I pointed out earlier. Main tabs (Daily deals, Store, Events, Travel, WOW Mall, Gas and Books) are shown in White in the dark grey background to easily identify.

19. Critical content is above the “fold”: Apart from approximately 24 small deals, main deals are displayed right under the company logo. They are also highlighted by changing the deals from 5 seconds to 5 seconds.

20. Styles & colors are consistent: When you click on a deal, the amount you could save is always in blue colour and the amount you could buy that particular good is in green colour. So the details of deals are easily recognizable.

21. Emphasis (bold, etc.) is used sparingly: Main tabs are in bold to emphasize the importance and to draw attention. On top of the “WOW Mall” tab there’s a label in red to show that it’s a new tab. In the top right corner of the page, there’s an animation about “coming soon” deals.

22. Ads & pop‐ups are unobtrusive: There are no pop-ups in Anything.lk but could see ads in terms of deals.

23. Main copy is concise & explanatory: Of course, when you have a glimpse of the home page, you could see that this page is all about best deals available in Sri Lanka.

24. URLs are meaningful & user‐friendly: The URL is also the name of the company which is www.anyhthing.lk

    25. HTML page titles are explanatory: Page titles (in the <TITLE> tag) should be descriptive, unique, and have appropriate number of keywords for the visitors to search. In this case if you right click on the page and click on “view page source” you could see  the title tag as “<title>Best Daily Deals | Best Online Shopping Experience with Anything.lk | No. 1 Daily Deals Website</title>” and it is descriptive enough. 

So according to my opinion, Anything.lk can be categorized as one of best websites in Sri Lanka even though it has minor drawbacks. It has also received the silver award for the Best Sri Lankan website in 2012 and Gold winner of Best E-commerce and advertising website in 2012. Well, that’s it for today; would like to know your opinions as well.