In a previous post,  we looked at a general summation of the benefits of participating in groups on LinkedIn, as well as creating your own LinkedIn groups. But just what makes a successful LinkedIn Group?

Your LinkedIn Group needs to be carefully crafted, nurtured, promoted and measured, just as you would for your website or blog.  From the set up, description, interaction and growth, attention must be paid to every detail. The following is a guide to help you envision and create your group. In a later post we will look into promoting and nurturing your group.

Creating a Strong Backbone for Success

Before you create your group, you need to determine the goal of this group. Popular goals include:

• To create a forum of like-minded people to discuss a particular topic or issue with colleagues
• To seek advice on a particular solution to a problem
• To offer a repository for jobs in a particular field
• To create a focus group for peers to discuss common roadblocks in their field, and offer support and suggestions

Once you have a goal, the next bits are the building blocks to your group:

Group Name – choose a name that easily conveys what the group is about. Consider this your billboard (or in SEO-speak, you title tag)

Group Logo – Using your business/company logo (or creating a unique Group logo) gives your group a visual recognition marker.

Group Description – give a concise description of the group, pointing out what makes this group unique. Take advantage of targeted keyphrases that you may have optimized your site for, but don’t be salesy. (This would be the equivalent in SEO of your meta-description)

Determine Your Access Level

LinkedIn provides two levels of access.  “Open Access” means faster growth with less control. “Request to Join” probably means slower growth but with more control. You can change the access level once the group has been created, and have an idea of the direction into which the group is organically evolving.

The Power of a Good First Impression: Join Messages

One of the greatest features in your set up is the ability to turn on and customize your request to join and auto-messages for new group members. This rarely-used feature allows you to make a spectacular first impression on your incoming group members. If you want to be really unique, you can also enable and edit your decline and decline and message features, but this, in my opinion, is not necessary. Some relevant points to include on your welcome message are:

• More details about the group that may not have made it to your group description
• Encouragement to contribute to the group, make suggestions and give feedback.
• Information about you as the moderator of the group, along with an option to connect to you.

The First Group Discussion

Your discussions are the Petri dish for success. This is the place where members will come to engage with your group, ask questions & share Information. It is recommended, just like your blog or email blasts, that you create an editorial calendar for your discussions, in case you need to nurture the group to start becoming active, or to inject some life, if activity grows stale. But there are some discussions that are bound to lead to success:

Guidelines

Many groups have unfortunately fallen victim to members and information that add no value. You can avoid this happing to your group by creating a discussion that reviews some rules that encourage people to engage in a meaningful way rather than to self-promote. This is often founf in the Group rules section, but is important enough to create a discussion on, in case members have any questions.

Introductions

A great way to break the ice is to create an introduction discussion. This gives members the opportunity to introduce themselves, their company, their interests and how they would like to benefit from being a member of the group.

You can ensure that these two discussions always remain featured (the section in the upper right hand corner of the discussions page called “manager’s choice”) so that new members can introduce themselves & familiarize themselves with the rules.

It is Alive! – But Now What?

In Internet culture, there is a 1% rule or the 90-9-1 principle which says that for every 100 people in a community, 90 people lurk, 9 comment and 1 posts. Your goal should be to create a safe and comfortable environment where members can freely share knowledge and best practices around the group topics, with the outcome that everyone gets something out if it.

As in other social media outlets, content is key to a successful LinkedIn Group. It is important that the content, whether posted by you or by members of the group, is relevant to your description of the group and reflects the themes and interests of its members. Some ideas of content for your discussions include:

Asking a question.

Encourage members to use the discussions forum to post thought provoking questions and ideas that will generate a discussion and not just in one hit wonder or self promotional type posting

Sharing Links that create dialogue.

Links to articles, videos blogs and websites should be used to genuinely support a dialogue. Avoid simply posting a link. Rather, interject your opinion, or ask a question about the link and ask for input from other members.

Posting Events

Allow members to post relevant upcoming events, workshops, webinars, etc. but ensure that there is no spamming or repeat posting.

Engage in Each Other’s Discussions

Encourage members to also actively engage with other members through asking and answering questions & seeking out opinions.

Be a Good Role Model

There is a certain amount of “dirty work” involved in maintaining your LinkedIn Group. You need to monitor for spam and advertising, or for people who post links as part of lead generation. You will also have occasion to delete posts that break these rules, and yes, even block repeat offenders.

The best thing to do is to lead by example, follow the rules, and encourage people to engage by commenting on discussions and creating their own discussions within your Group.

For a community to be successful it needs to be nurtured and have a strong leader, while not being managed. “Managed” infers policing and administration and although this is par for the course, providing community leadership is much more important.

A successful LinkedIn Group starts with the groundwork researched and foundation built, but endures because both online and offline activities. Whether you are in a meeting in a conference room, attending a trade show or having any conversation / discussion with someone — and the conversation is relevant for your LinkedIn group — encourage them to join and post in the group to share with the other members.

What recommendations do you have for starting new LinkedIn Groups?

Lee Schwartz, eMagine Online Marketing Strategist

Once you have determined the best targeted keyphrases with which to optimize your website, you need to concentrate on writing your content. Below are the best practices, which, if followed explicitly, should increase visibility in the SERP (search engine results pages) for your site with your targeted keyphrases. The first few practices involve the naming of your pages (URLs) and menu items, and the remainders are recommendations for optimizing each page of content:

Keyword Targeted URLs

Depending on your CMS (content management system) you should be able to alias each page URL to include your targeted keyphrase (www.yourwebsite.com/section-targeted-keyphrase.htm). This practice of including your keyphrase into the relevant page’s URL is an indicator to the search engines that you believe this phrase to be relevant to the page.

Keyword Targeted Menu Items

You should use your targeted keyphrase in your menu items, or navigation to your site. By putting these phrases into your architecture you are indicating to the search engines (and to your visitors) that you believe this phrase is relevant to the section or page of your site.

Title Tag

This is the first place search engines spiders evaluate relevance of the page, and the title of your page, in most cases, in the search engine results. This is your billboard to attract visitors to click on your link, and not the other links. Your title tag should be 70 characters or less. If you want to include your brand name, put it at the end of the tag. Each page needs to have a unique title tag.

META Keywords Tag

This tag is not evaluated in the Google algorithm, so it is not necessary to populate. However, stuffing it with multitudes of phrases can be used against you.

META Description Tag

155 characters is optimal. Ideally you want to incorporate your targeted keyword(s) and a compelling CTA. This tag is one of the three places Google looks to populate content under your organic search result (other two are the content of your page or DMOZ). As an example, go to your browser and type in one of the targeted keyphrases (eg, high voltage testing equipment). Link is the Title Tag, description under is either content on page, META Description tag or DMOZ description. If the Title Tag is your billboard, the meta description is your “hook” to define what the page is about. Each page should to have a unique META Description tag.

Page Heading or H1 Tag

This is the second place search engines spiders evaluate relevance of the page. You should incorporate your targeted keyphrase (or even repeat your title tag) into H1 messaging. Try to avoid the use of your brand or product naming as your H1, as your brand has no relevance to a visitor who knows nothing about you. In addition to your H1 tag, consider incorporating variations or your targeted keyphrase, or even long-tail keywords synonymous to your targeted keyphrase into subsequent heading tags (H2, H3, etc). Every page needs to have a unique H1 Tag

Content

Use your targeted keyphrases 2-3 times in an average page of 200-250 words. Keyphrase should appear once within the first sentences and bolded in the first instance. For each phrase, consider one “parent” or “Godfather” page and several “child” pages of relevance content around the phrase and variations of the phrase. On other pages, link to the phrase using the linked page’s targeted keyphrase as anchor text, to reinforce relevance to the page (i.e., on your “pink fuzzy dice” page, you may mention that you also offer blue fuzzy dice, and the phrase “blue fuzzy dice” links to the blue fuzzy dice page).

Home Page Content

If your site has an “about us” section of text on the home page, be sure to have approximately 150 words of text with your most important keyphrases (1-3) in the text. These keyphrases should be anchor links to the interior pages that are most relevant to the respective phrases.

Timing is everything – The best time to post to your Facebook Timeline in general is between 8 p.m.-7 a.m. but check your
analytics and experiment to find the time that’s best for your company. Find more information on timing your Facebook posts.

What a Difference a Day Makes – In general, stories posted on Thursdays and Fridays have 18% more engagement than posts on other days. For more statistics on engagement check out this article.

Can You Go To the Well Too Often? – Don’t exceed two posts a day; otherwise, fans may hide you from their newsfeed and never see your posts again, unless they choose to manually change their preferences.

Consistency is key – Post one to four time every week for best results.

Learn more about the frequency of your posts here

Keep it Short and Simple – Shorter posts receive the best engagement, so keep your posts under 40 characters, or at least under 80 characters. Learn more about how posts 80 characters or less in length receive 27% higher engagement rates with this data report.

Are you asking me? – Question posts generate twice as much engagement as non-question posts. Fill-in-the-blank posts get nine times as many comments as other posts; for example, “The best thing about the new Facebook Timeline is _______.” Learn more about asking how to ask the right questions on Facebook.

Don’t forget the buzzwords – Use the words “coupons” and “$ off” when posting about discounts. These tend to do better than “% off” discounts.

No one like a stale roll – Update your Timeline and switch up your images regularly. When fans get used to your digital persona, they won’t have any reason to visit your page often.

Updating your Timeline regularly, switching up your cover photo, and introducing new App icons every so often will keep your content fresh and encourage return visits to your Timeline from your fans.

What other best practices do you have for posting on Facebook?

- Lee Schwartz, eMagine Online Marketing Strategist

One of the greatest challenges in working on a web project is that so much of the planning work feels abstract, and the building of the site itself is mostly behind the scenes.

If you’ve ever done any type of home building or remodeling project though, you already have the understanding you need.

With web work versus building, you don’t get to see the workers in their hard hats, digging a foundation, connecting to utilities, framing, running wires and pipes, HVAC, and all the other steps involved in the process. But the process has a lot of similarities.

Both processes involve designers and architects.

The architect helps you determine what you are building in the first place – what the purpose will be, whom it will serve, how many pages or rooms, how many windows or doors, or in the case of the web site, call outs (which are like Point of Sale materials in the brick and mortar business world)

The designer helps you determine what it will look like – what colors, what the details will be, what will go in the pages or rooms.

Both processes involve engineers and developers.

The engineer helps figure out what the structural requirements are – how many visitors the building or site will need to be able to handle. What the best materials or code will be for the specific requirements.

The developers actually build the site, factoring in the design, the functional requirements, the architecture, and the specifics of the particular environment, whether it’s the siting and building code for construction or remodel, or specific browser and platform needs for a new web site.

There is also the most important resource – the client. At the end of the day, in the case of a construction project, he or she is moving into the building with furniture, pictures, welcoming guests, living in and with the end project. For a web site, the parallel is the content – text, images – how you share your brand, welcome visitors and share your brand.

Finally, there is the project manager, making sure all the different pieces come together as smoothly as possible and facilitating communication between the construction team and the client.

One of the huge differences in being able to see the work itself, as with a construction project, is that when a client asks for the bathroom to be moved from the southeast corner of the house to the the northwest corner AFTER the house has been built, it’s pretty clear what’s going on and why when the general contractor comes back with a new estimate and bill.

Thats what makes the planning process so important and what ultimately engages the client in paying close attention to the blueprints before anything is built. Even there, the best laid plans run into snafus.

It’s exactly the same with the web.

You don’t see the workers tearing out walls and redoing plumbing, electrical and HVAC, repainting walls, moving furniture, rehanging pictures, etc… but the same rules apply.

At eMagine, we place strong emphasis on the planning and documentation process to help ensure that what your final build goes as smoothly as possible. Because the process itself is abstract and you can’t see the hard-hatted workers plugging away, it’s easy to discount the importance of “measuring twice, cutting once.”

But paying close attention to the early stages of your architecture and design process will help assure the smoothest possible process when it comes to your site-warming party, and keeps your project on budget and on time.

Just think of a house.

Ben Jones,  eMagine Project Manager

While most businesses know the value of Google Analytics, there are a straggering amount of sites that still do not have this free tool installed on their site. Many sites, while they do have Google Analytics installed, are not measuring basic metrics such as hits, views, visits and conversions, or even have goals established.

Today we take a look back at some previous posts for valuable insights on the relationship between Google Analytics and measuring business success:

Page Load Time

How successful your site is in the eyes of Google is partly determined by the speed in which a page loads in your visitors’ browser. Our previous blog post discusses the benefits of keeping an eye on your site “speed“.

Email

While relatively abstract to some Google Analytics can indeed track your email results. This blog post shows that, by using Google’s URL Builder and your ESPs tracking services, you can factor email referrals in Google Analytics.

Social Media

As Social Media continues to take the lead in dictating more and more to Google, we discuss how to track traffic from social media in Google Analytics. And, once you have tracked this traffic, we showed how to improve your social media efforts with Google Analytics data.

We also presented a three part series on measuring your social media ROI with Google Analytics via campaign tagging, advanced segments, and profile filters.

So, what does Google Analytics mean to your business? How has the information helped you make smart and effective decisions for your social media presence, your website and your business? Share with us in the comments below.

Lee Schwartz, eMagine Online Marketing Strategist

***Bonus! Our friends over at Small Biz Technology just posted a great post this morning on 13 Ways to Use Website Analytics to the fullest, with even more insight. Check it out!

Hangouts are an important, yet often unused feature of Google+ for businesses. Similar to Skype or a webinar, Hangouts allow you to host a video chat with up to 10 people that you have in your Circles. What makes Hangouts better than the alternatives are the very reasons you should be using them for your business.

Use Hangouts to offer free demos – Many businesses offer a one to one demonstration of their solutions or services as a call to action on their website. Why not try to capture potential leads by offering a group demonstration on a hangout? This can entice people who may not yet be willing to step up for a private consultation to sample your solution in a group environment. Demos in a hangout also allow for multiple points of feedback, which can help you improve your demos in future.

Use Hangouts for client meetings – We all have had customer meetings where there are multiple players in multiple locations. By creating
a hangout with your customer and your employees, you create that “in-person” feeling without the need for travel. This can be of great benefit when your customer has multiple locations across multiple time zones, allowing your customers a certain freedom and flexibility.

Use Hangouts for focus groups – An immensely useful way to take advantage of hangouts is for focus groups. Imagine you are a medical device company that needs the buy-in of C-level executives to install your solution into their hospital. Why not set up a focus group of these executives (be they existing clients or prospects, or both) to uncover new avenues in which to penetrate this marketshare? Creating this peer group arena allows for the free flow of ideas and discussions, and be immensely useful for your business planning.

Join other Hangouts to network with influencers- The power of this medium lies not only in creating hangouts, but attending others. Build your circles with key influencers with whom you’d like to connect and watch for times when they are hosting Hangouts you can join.

Use Hangouts for telecommuting employees or satellite offices – if your company has multiple offices, or some of your workforce works from home, Hangouts can be a great place for meeting, or even for training purposes.

One of the best reasons to use hangouts is that they recordable. So whether you use them for demonstrations, focus groups, customer feedback, testimonials, client meetings, trainings or employee brainstorming sessions, you can use this valuable content as a video asset down the road.

As a business that is actively using Google+ hangouts for business purposes, you have created a space where you can rise above your competition, and stand out by being able to successfully harness the power of Hangouts.

Have you used Google+ Hangouts for your business? Share your story.

Lee Schwartz – eMagine Online Marketing Strategist

At the end of March, Facebook changed over all pages to the Timeline layout. This radical move has left many business owners scratching their heads, wondering how this will affact their presence on this platform, and how they will need to change their strategy to take advantage of the new layout.

How does the new Timeline affect your presence on Facebook?

We have always known that users are drawn to your Facebook page, and once they “liked” it, very often had little interaction with your actual page anymore. In fact, only 1-5% of fans actually visit your page. This means the power of your presence should rely heavily on your posts, as it is your fans’ Newsfeed that is your contstant touchpoint to your audience.

But don’t underestimate the power of the first impression — and that is your timeline. And while the old version gave you the power to choose whether a new visitor was driven to app first, the new version give your visitors the experience of your brand starting with a large cover photo that apears above the fold. (Apps aren’t gone, BTW: in fact, they are more important than ever, but we’ll talk about that in your strategy).

This giant cover photo gives you the opportunity to really show your audience what you are all about. But there’s a catch – gone are the days of promoting apps and encouraging people to “like” or “share” your page on your images. You also cannot include pricing or purchase information on your cover photo, nor can you put contact information (web address, email or mailing addres) or any calls to action in it. A good way to look at it is, if you can include it in your About section, you should not put it in your cover photo.

Other photo opportunities exist in your profile picture and thumbnail picture. It should be noted that the profile and cover photo overlap, you have a unique opportunity to create a unique and eye-catching image. Just be sure they also can stand on their own.

What should be your new strategy to take advantage of the new Timeline layout?

Posts in newsfeed – now more than ever, the content of your posts is what will keep fans engaged with your brand. In the new Timeline format, you can tell your company’s story in a very customized, visual format.And your posts are now called stories, so use them as such. Fine unique and engaging ways like photos, videos, questions, milestones, and fill in the blanks to consistently engage visitors and keep them coming back for more. The addition of starred posts and Milestones allow you to showcase milestones such as awards, events, new product releases and business growth.

Pinned posts – This new feature allows you to pin a story to the top of your timeline for up to 7 days using the pencil icon. Your pinned posts will be prominently displayed the top left of your Timeline where visitors can easily see it. Pin stories which include links to places you want your users to engage with the most, such as to your business’s website or to a particular app. Speaking of apps,

Apps – the good news in here for appls. Their actual real estate on the new timeline format has almost doubled. Use this increased real estate to customize your apps whether you are running a contest, making an annoucement, or driving traffic. Another great stretegy is to use your apps to get people to subscribe to an email list.
Facebook has given businesses the unique opportunity with the new Timeline layout to improve ROI and conversions by pinning posts, creating app icons and telling stories, all of which can be used to drive traffic to specific places you control. By catching your visitor’s eye with a large, relevant cover photo and strong calls to action on your apps to drive traffic to where you choose, Facebook has created a powerful tool for marketers and business owners alike.

How have you taken advantage of the new Timeline to improve your business’ presence on Facebook?

Lee Schwartz – eMagine Online Marketing Strategist