Social media is very big for businesses right now: Research shows that social media advertising budgets worldwide have doubled in the past two years alone—from about $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016—and that they are further expected to increase by 26.3 percent in 2017, exceeding $35 billion.
That said, a lot has been written about social media strategy for businesses. However, very little has been written about website fundamentals that actually turn your social media efforts into revenue and profit.
If you ignore the following website fundamentals, you could very well see your social media efforts go down the drain:
Effectively optimizing your website for speed
Website speed and social media success are two things very few people will connect, but having a slow website can significantly undermine your social media efforts. Besides the fact that research has established that we now have a much shorter attention span (eight seconds today, compared with 12 seconds in 2000), attention span on social media is generally much lower. This explains why a single second delay in site load time could result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions.
While there are website tweaks and hacks that you can use to boost conversions from your social media efforts, ensuring that your website is fast enough is perhaps the most important of them. Otherwise, most social media users will have left before even having a chance to take a look at what you have to offer.
Setting up effective analytics and conversion tracking
Experienced advertisers have for a very long time been harping on the importance of focusing on tested advertising methods. When it comes to social media, many people fail to understand what really matters.
The discussion is usually centered around how cheap social media advertising is. In fact, in a recent survey of business-to-business marketers, more than one-half of respondents rated social media ads as somewhat low cost or very low cost.
However, true advertisers know that there is something much more important than cost of advertising: return on investment. And the only way to truly measure ROI is to have a website properly set up for tracking and analytics.
