It all depends on you really…
A recent survey in the US, found that currently, 8% of online Americans use Twitter. The report produced by the Pew Internet & American Life Project is the latest in a line of interesting stats coming out of Twitter this year. This survey of 2,257 US adults carried out in September 2010 highlights (despite the relatively small sample size) the 8% that use it, but more importantly highlights the large amount of people that use it, but only very occasionally.
For a payment service provider such as Lancore, respect in the market is vital and as such social media interaction can allow us to develop alongside potential users of our money transfer services. This same basic model can be extremely useful for the vast majority of online businesses (big and small) in creating the kind of interaction that promotes them in this multi-million user marketplace.
While the US may be seeing a relatively lower than expected usage statistic, but no less impressive, the fact is that the rest of the world makes up the majority of new users. With overall user numbers skyrocketing up to 105million+ since 2006, you can take your finger off the ‘delete twitter account’ button for now. Stats released by Twitter at their developer’s conference back in April should convince you that Twitter is a valuable place to post your information:
- 300, 000 users added per day
- 180 million unique visitors daily
- 3 billion requests a day – meaning a lot of tweets are read
- 55 million Tweets posted daily
- 600 million queries on its search engine daily
These stats should give you an idea of just how popular Twitter is. Now the question was: How important is Twitter to you online business? The answer, as I said, depends on you. Basically if you are able to post regularly, provide good unique content or at least link to or re-tweet relevant content for you business, you will eventually grow you followers. With enough followers you business will have a handy platform from which to speak to your customers through a popular and easy to use medium.
Twitter Analytics is a new dashboard coming around the end of 2010. This will give you access to valuable information on your users that can help you track: who has re-tweeted your posts, how often they have re-tweeted and any mentions, follows and un-follows. You can also track the success of an individual tweet which would come in very handy so you can work out what kinds of information your business is putting out there, is being gobbled up by your users.
Twitter is a steadily growing social medium. Online businesses might sit and look at the stats here and there and question whether or not to start a Twitter account or to delete the one they have due to lack of inquiries from that source. The fact is that you may just be ‘tweeting’ the wrong sort of thing. Using Twitter Analytics can help your business optimise your tweets so that you can tap into the billions of tweets being read every day around the world.
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and has a near monopoly over the billions of searches made through search engines every day. This gives them rather a lot of power over the internet. Luckily for us, Google is quite nice and has the philosophy “Don’t Be Evil” which means that they have your best interests at heart.
Event tracking is not the most common aspect of Google Analytics and can often be overlooked by users. However it can be very useful for many different kinds of site in providing an alternative way to gather data on user trends. What Event Tracking provides is information on when and how users are interacting with various website elements such as file downloads and a variety of page gadgets. Basically, a more advanced profile of user interaction with the more dynamic aspects of your site (i.e. those that don’t take you to another page).
As we’ve often discussed on this blog, Google Analytics has an abundance of features to offer any web company, allowing them to effectively monitor the traffic to their site. This in turn allows them to best tailor their site to the needs of their users. However, one thing which we have never yet draw attention to but really should have is Urchin. Urchin was a software company which Google acquired in 2006 and went on to become Google Analytics. However in the process there was also another variation of the web analysis software created which became known as Urchin. While both offer in-depth web analysis there are obviously many differences between the two services, so how do you know which is right for your business?
When it comes it familiarising yourself with the Google Analytics system there are a lot of areas that require looking into to give you a reasonably concise overview. Among the most important areas to familiarise yourself with are the monitoring of visitor data and creating and tracking goals within your sites account. This requires quite a bit of time to be put aside in order to really get a feel for the system. However, once you have this under your belt you can make the next vital step in analysing and utilising the data that analytics gathers for your site in order to really begin optimising your site for success.
The team at Google Analytics offers a variety of features and usefully are regularly updating them and introducing new ones. Analytics users are constantly asking Google to provide certain features that would be of use and there are a few suggestions which crop up more often than others. Fortunately, Google do listen and the users get their hands on something that can really enhance their use of analytics and benefit their business.
As we are all very well aware, Google Analytics can provide unrivalled insight into the inner workings of your website. Several of our previous articles have discussed how it can be used to optimise site content and ecommerce systems to improve sales as well as using the visitor features to tailor your site for your user-base. These articles have shown the usefulness of Analytics and how the data can be displayed in varying formats to assist in its analysis. Without these features the analytics data is a complex array of almost indiscernible data. This is where the 
As any website guru will tell you, ‘content is king’. This applies as much to an ecommerce site as to any other. It is vital that the site provides something invaluable to potential customers. Of course no website will be perfect for everyone but it is vital that even in a niche market you are providing a very high standard. For an ecommerce site, content refers to products and services.
