​Have you taken a look at all of the pages on your website recently? How about the depths of your Twitter account? Chances are there’s a page lingering somewhere in the dark corners of a drop down menu that hasn’t been updated in a while. In this post, we’ll take a look at four different ways to assess the freshness of your content.
 
“Freshness” can refer to content on your website, blog, or in your email and social media channels.  Why does freshness matter? It sends a signal both to your audiences and to search engines that you’re still there and that you care enough about them and your business to keep your content up to date.
 
There’s nothing worse than showing up at a restaurant only to realize that the hours on their website aren’t accurate, and that they’ve changed for the summer. Or to be working on a policy issue…that’s already passed through Congress.
 
Here are four ways that you can ensure that your content is fresh:

​Checking for Ghosts: When’s the last time you updated your Facebook page? How about your blog? The first step in the process is to see if you’ve posted anything in a while. Are you active, or is it a ghost town?
 
If you’re not sure what to talk about, think about the top pages on your website, and pull a fact, quote, or statistic from that page to share on your social media channels. Your blog is a great place to answer all of the questions that your clients are asking. Your email inbox might be a great source of blog post ideas.

There's Something Scary in the Back of Your Content Fridge: Okay, so let’s say you are pretty on top of updating your website and social channels on a regular basis. What you might want to do is to go page-by-page through your top-level navigation, and check to make sure that the most visible pages on your site are accurate and up to date. 

​Google Analytics has a wealth of information on your content. One report that we like to look at regularly is Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. This report will give you a nice look at the most popular pages on your website. ​

Get Social with Your Metrics: It’s a good idea to look at your top posts. We recommend doing this on a monthly basis. We like to look at our top 5 posts sorted by reach, and then by engagement.

When looking at engagement (which is a catch-all term that describes likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc.) it's important to keep in mind that if a post reached few people and the engagement rate is very high, that bit of might not be as helpful to you as seeing the stats on a post that reached more people but had slightly less engagement.

Our top five social media posts often give us ideas for future social media posts or even blog posts topics.
 
Below, is an example from a report we pulled in Sprout Social for our client Clergy for a New Drug Policy.

We hope this gives you some great ideas to keep things fresh! Let us know if you have questions about content freshness in a comment below.

For more tips on making your social media content work harder, check out some of the other posts in our social media audit series.

We talked to entrepreneur (and client) Derek Notman of Intrepid Wealth Partners about why it's so important to have talking points for your business.

Similar to an elevator pitch, talking points are a set of 3-5 bulletpoint statements that explain what you do, who you do it for, and what the main benefits of what you do are for your customers.

Tell us about what you do.

As a certified financial planner I specialize in working with entrepreneurs, from startup through exit, on their financial planning to help them realize their hopes, dreams & goals.

What did it used to feel like, when you had to introduce yourself and your company, before you had talking points?

​I have struggled with this over 11 years.  I used to try and avoid talking about what I did for a living.  Not having organized talking points resulted in me telling each person I met [what I do in] a slightly different explanation and it always felt like they didn’t quite understand what I was talking about! 

How has having talking points changed your experience of introducing yourself and your company? 
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It has boosted my confidence.  I am much more comfortable explaining what I do and who I do it for.  It comes across as clear and concise, people understand what I do and who I do it for and will even ask additional questions to learn more.

How do you use your talking points? How have you been using them on your team?

I use them in person and in my digital communications.  Regardless of how they are being told, they are telling the same message across all channels.  My team is also using them and we have modified them depending on whether we are talking about ourselves or the overall firm.

Do you think that other business owners should have talking points for their business too?

​It is a must!  If you have a business, then you are selling something, whether it is a service, product, widget, whatever, you much be able to tell your story quickly and concisely to get people’s attention and keep them interested. 

​If you don’t have talking points then do you really know your own business and what you do?  If you can’t clearly explain it, then how could you ever expect your potential customers to ever know what you do or what you sell, and how it may benefit them?

Is there anything else that you took away from our work together to develop talking points?

It was simple and a quick exercise, but absolutely necessary!  It has helped me better pitch my business via a multitude of mediums, all while telling a consistent message.

I spent a lot of time in my father's and my late Pop Pop's woodshops as a kid. They used to say "Measure Twice, Cut Once." Another way to say that is if you plan an effort carefully, you won't waste costly resources and time. I think that's a good lesson that also applies to work that I do in helping companies large and small evaluate their social media efforts, and develop a social media strategy. 

So this post, which considers three different yardsticks that we can use to measure the effectiveness of our social media efforts, is written in their honor. Happy Father's Day Dad! 

​Evaluate your social media accounts against known best practices: There are certain well-defined best practices that can help you understand if your accounts are set up to succeed or fail.

These include making sure that your Facebook posts are not too long, tagging partner organizations in your tweets, using hashtags appropriately on Instagram, understanding what types of content (such as DIY projects and recipes) tend to do well on Pinterest, and figuring out how to leverage both your employee's personal accounts and your company's page on LinkedIn.

A social media strategist can perform an social media audit, an independent evaluation of your social media accounts. Or, take a look at what your competitors and peer organizations are doing and see whether their content sparks any fresh ideas. 

Evaluate your social media program for content balance, tone, and relevance: Your social media program is not going to be effective if every post that you do is focused on sales.

Rather, you need to create a balance of content that informs, inspires, and drives clear calls to action. You also need to consider what types of content might be most useful and interesting to your target audience.

Similarly, you want to make sure that the tone of your accounts is aligned with your target audiences, and is consistent across all of your social media accounts.

A social media audit can help any business or organization rally their team around a cohesive vision that fits seamlessly into broader marketing and business goals.

But to be successful after an audit is completed, you need to develop a roadmap to success. It’s important to prioritize what issues you’re going to tackle, and to develop a specific timeline for implementing those changes.

Here are four questions you can ask yourself when making a roadmap.
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1. What tactics best support your vision and your goals?
   
   Part of a successful social media audit process should include the creation of a vision statement for your social media program.
   
   You can then use your vision statement as a guidepost for making decisions about what you should tackle first.
   
   To think about this another way, you should stay laser-focused on your core goals. Tackle tasks related to those goals first, then move onto other lower priority activities.
   
   
2. What roadblocks preventing your success do you need to overcome most urgently to achieve that vision? 
   
   There are simple steps that you can take to improve your social media marketing team’s workflow, such as establishing editorial deadlines so that your team gets content on time.
   
   Or perhaps your team lacks access to professional social media management tools. Your social media managers may wish to report on the success of their efforts, but may lack the tools that would help them make those reports quickly and efficiently. Giving them those tools can create an immediate impact on your program's ability to report on return on investment, also known as ROI.
   
   
3. What efforts will work within your current workflow? 
   
   We get it. Rome was not built in a day. And you're dealing with a set of challenges and constraints that are unique to your business. Whether you're working in an industry that is regulated, or are just understaffed, taking the constraints that you are facing into account will be key for your success.
   
   We recommend developing a detailed timeline for implementing recommendations, starting with tasks that are either low effort (low hanging fruit), highest priority based on your goals, or which are easy to accomplish without making major changes to your team or your website. 
   
   Knock those puppies off your list and then bask in the energy and momentum you've gained by shortening your to do list.

​

4. How can you train staff to support them in achieving your company's vision? 

Training your staff is a common follow-up step to implementing audit recommendations. Identify any internal and external experts that can help improve competency in core areas.

Whether you are bringing in an outside consultant to address the issues that were uncovered by an audit or you’re engaging in peer-to-peer learning such as a brown bag lunch-and-learn series, it’s important to identify who will do the training and to put dates on the group's calendar for training sessions. 

5. How can you train your staff to address any issues uncovered during the audit?

If your social media audit has uncovered any issues that can be solved through training, get that scheduled too! If you have more than one person on your team consider assigning team members who are stronger on certain skills as a mentor to team members who show (through your social media metrics) or who self-identify as needing a little help. 

6. When will we reevaluate your program?

Getting a social media audit should not be a one-and-done activity. It’s important to set dates to re-evaluate your program, staff progress, and to check your progress against your timeline for implementing the recommendations from your audit. These deadlines will keep you accountable and ensure the success of your social media audit.

For large organizations with complex teams who might be dispersed around the country or the globe, there are often significant roadblocks to estimating and capturing social media data in traditional ways. This can make it difficult to set social media marketing goals. This is also a common workflow problem for groups of nonprofits who are partnering together on an awareness or fundraising campaign.

Some of the common obstacles I've observed in my social media audit practice include:

This can be a problem for both groups of organizations working toward a common goal, and for geographically dispersed teams, or teams across several departments.

Some orgs and departments will not prioritize professional social media management tools in their budgets, or won't allow social media managers to select the tools they'd like to be using.

When you are working with diverse teams or organizations you may not have a shared understanding of the metrics that matter.

On very large teams, it's common for some people to have advanced skills, and others to have a more rudimentary understanding of social media management and metrics.

Teams who have adequate spend to support their efforts will have an easier time reaching goals than teams who don't. 

Here's the best part of this approach: it vastly simplifies the problem of collecting metrics to create a campaign report.

Instead of tracking people down at the end of the campaign, and gathering disparate spreadsheets and reports, doing a lot of manual tabulation and analysis across accounts, you can instead ask this team two simple questions:

1. Did you hit your goal? If not, what were your results?
2. Was your goal too easy, just right, or too hard?
3. Any other successes you'd like to share with us?

 
The answer to the first question gives you the metric to report your success as a group.

The second question will tell you if you need to adjust your goals in the future.

The third question gives you open-ended qualitative data on how things went.
​ 
What approach to you take to setting social media goals? Learn about other solutions to common social media workflow issues in our earlier blog post.

There's a simple, powerful action you can take in the next five minutes to strengthen your social media brand.

This tip, which comes out of our social media audit work, is quick and easy to implement but will make a big impact.

In each of the five examples below, you will see that Starbucks uses an identical bio on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. "Inspiring and nuturing the human spirit--one person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time."

What does our partnership mean for our clients? Well it means that we're going to get to share a lot of awesome resources with you. If you've been working with us for a while you probably already have these bookmarked:

• A Complete Guide to 2017 Hashtag Holidays - a great resource for content planning
• The Always Up to Date Guide to Social Media Image Sizes
• How to Measure the Value of Social Media

We'll also be among the first to learn, and tell you, about the products new features in our ongoing work to provide you with superior social media management services. We look forward to what the future brings.

This video from entrepreneur Marie Forleo has some really excellent advice on shifting the focus of your website copy away from yourself, to focus on your customers' needs and wants.

You can head over to Marie Forleo's blog to read her full post.

When we start working with a client on content strategy, we advocate taking a similar approach. We often start with the following types of exercises:
​

• Brand Positioning Statement: This exercise helps us craft a simple statement that says what you, or your company, does, how you do it, who you do it for, and how you're solving the problem uniquely in comparison to your competitors.
• Value Proposition Statements: We frequently help our clients complete a value proposition canvas that identifies the needs and wants of each of your target customers--this is exactly what Marie Forleo is talking about in the video above--and how those match up with your products and service offerings. (The canvas is available for free! You can download it and fill it out for your business).
• Talking Points and Key Messages: The next step in the process is to take what we have learned to craft a set of 3-5 statements that concisely describe yourself or your company, and the main benefits of what you are doing to your customers.

Once you have a set of talking points or key messages you can use them in a number of different ways: you can use them verbally, when you are giving interviews or an elevator pitch about your business.

You can use them in headlines and other prominent places on your website. As Marie Forleo suggests, this work can also influence the labels you use in your website navigation. You can also use them when you're describing your business in a press release, and so much more.

When we started working with ONVI on the creation of a marketing system to promote their innovative Prophix toothbrush, we started with these exact exercises. 

A year later, we found that the results of these simple exercises were still helping us write focused, consistent copy for everything from packaging design, to a booth at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Whether you decide to tweak your copy on your own, or work with a consultant like us on your content strategy, putting your customers first and tying their needs and wants back to your products and services is the best strategy for increasing sales or other conversions, while also fostering trust with your customers.

Today, in our social media audit series, we’re sharing a quick tip that you can tackle in five minutes, to improve the effectiveness of your social media content.

We all know that strong calls to action, such as "buy now" or "sign up today" are critical for getting people to do the things that we'd like to see them do as a result of seeing our social media posts. But it's important to check your posts to make sure that you're actually remembering to include them.
​
Here's what you should do in the next five minutes: Take a look at your five most recent social media posts and see how many of them include a specific "ask" to do something, whether that's read an article, sign up for your newsletter, or purchase tickets to an event.

If the answer is "no", here are some follow up actions you can take to improve your posts.

If you want to increase email newsletter sign ups, for example, send people to a dedicated sign up landing page. Don't make people hunt for the form in the bottom of your website.

There's a quick and easy thing you can do to improve your content metrics, such as bounce rates and time on site. That's to filter SPAM out of your Google Analytics reports.

If you're looking at your Google Analytics Acquisition report and you see a bunch of suspicious looking referral sources, that include phrases like "free traffic", Russian characters (as in the lifehacker example below), or which end in .xyz, then it's important to filter SPAM out of your Google Analytics account.

Expert digital marketers are able to look your Google Analytics Acquisition report to assess strengths and opportunities of your marketing program. It helps us assess:

• Whether the amount of your traffic from organic search is healthy
• Whether you could be doing a little bit more with social media
• Whether your hard work with your email newsletters is paying off in more traffic
• Whether public relations and guest blogging is yielding more referral traffic. 

​If your referral traffic is artificially inflated because it has a bunch of SPAM in it, it won't give us an accurate picture of what's going on.

Other consequences of not filtering out SPAM include:

• Higher site-wide bounce rate (many SPAM referrers have a 100% bounce rate - so this will throw off your averages)
• Lower average time on site.
• Artificially inflated website traffic statistics.

Setting up a Google SPAM filter should take ten minutes of time or less.

This is what you need to do to get a list of the SPAM URLs in your report. Look for URLs in your referral report that end in "xyz", which contain Russian characters, or include the word "free" in them.

​This Moz article on stopping SPAM bots lists some common SPAM referrers in it.

Make sure you're looking at the "View" column, and clicking on "Filters". It's a little confusing because there is also an "All Filters" label under the "Account" column.

If you don't see this button, you're not going crazy. You just don't have the right permissions to add a filter to your account. Talk to the owner of your Google Analytics account about granting you permissions to add filters to your account.

The graphic below shows what your SPAM filter should look like. Make sure to click on the "Custom" tab. In the "Filter Pattern" filed you can include multiple URLs separate by a pipe ( | ). When typing in the URLs into the filter, leave off the "http://"

 
Google Analytics only allows you to enter so many characters into the "Filter Pattern" field, so after entering about ten URLs, you may need to set up a second SPAM filter. 

Finally, it's important to check your Referral report for SPAM on a monthly or quarterly basis, to make sure that the SPAM referral sources are not creeping back into your reports.