I loathe the “experts”, “gurus”, “jedis” and whatever horrid names they come up with for “social media mavens”. Anyone calling themselves an “expert” in this space has no idea what they are talking about. Nor does any of them know how to run a real business.
Social media reminds me of SEO – both had an initial boom with tons of snake oil hucksters. But I think both fields are maturing for the most part and the dust is being settled. If someone tries selling social media or SEO as a full fledged marketing program, that’s a mistake, but if it’s part of something larger, it makes sense. The clowns are the ones who sell those services as a cure all, the serious folks are those who sell the service as a measurable value add.
Every morning, I wake up at 5:30 am to get ready for school. I leave my house around 6:45 am to catch my 7:00 am train. During my commute, I use my iPhone to surf through my RSS feeds to catch up on news and other websites relating to my interest. If I come across something that I enjoyed reading, I usually share it with my Twitter followers.
There’s a problem though. Just because I’m awake at 7 am doesn’t mean the rest of my Twitter followers are awake as well. Because Twitter is such a fast paced social network, my tweet will quickly get buried under the hundreds (if not thousands) of other tweets. Not to mention, sharing too many articles too quickly is an easy way to spam people, hence pissing them off and encouraging them to unfollow you. This is when services like Buffer, Sharefeed, and Timely come in handy, which are awesome apps that allow me to schedule my tweets ahead of time so I can spread them out throughout the day.
But there’s another problem. I spend most of my day away from the computer and depend on my iPhone for most tasks. Sure I can access those websites from my iPhone, but since none of them have mobile-friendly versions or native iPhone apps, it becomes a pain to schedule my tweets.
So I created Twoffy as a means of scratching my own itch. Twoffy is an email based service that allows you to quickly schedule your tweets on the fly. Since all smartphones have email capabilities natively built in, this makes the process much more smoother.
Twoffy also has a web interface that allows you to add multiple Twitter accounts and edit/delete any scheduled tweets. There’s another cool feature that allows you to make your tweets longer than Twitter’s limit of 140 characters. Since most mobile email clients don’t give you a word/letter count, it would be difficult to tell if your tweet is within the limit. Don’t worry though, Twoffy will automatically shorten the tweet and add a URL at the end. This URL will be linked to a page where the full tweet can be viewed.
There you have it! I hope Twoffy is just as useful to you as it is to me.
This past October, I helped organize the 2nd American Muslim Consumer Conference. My role on the team was to create the web presence and use search and social media marketing tactics to increase the conference registrations.
Because we experimented with various marketing campaigns, our web traffic shot up immensely. The top 3 pages receiving the most traffic were the homepage, about page, and the blog. Not too many people were going to the registration page and signing up for the conference. I decided to set up an A/B test on the homepage, as it was receiving the most traffic, to understand why we weren’t getting enough people to register for the conference.
A/B testing, or split testing, is a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. In web terms, A/B testing essentially represents testing of more than one version of a web page to see which has a better outcome. These outcomes can include sign ups, click throughs to next page, conversions, etc.
The Experiment
Winner: Variation #2
Simply removing the one line of text increased the conversion rate by 19.4%.
Conclusion
As Avinash Kaushik says, “80% of the time you/we are wrong about what a customer wants/expects from our site experience.” Instead of being purely focused on advertising, take a break and run some tests on your landing pages. You’d be surprised by the results.
