October 19, 2012 by radii
Let's get one thing clear: social media matters. Unfortunately, like many perfectly valid pursuits undermined by the high ratio of teenagers doing them (okay, not many), social media is often an afterthought--if it isn't shrugged off entirely. From a business perspective, it deserves to be taken seriously. And by "seriously," we mean that it is worthy of effort and intention, not that it has to be (or should be, in any manner) approached with the same dry ploys of direct mail marketing or the stale sincerity of the decade-old spam collecting cyberdust in unread email folders.
But even those who embrace social media often overlook one very important element--the user experience. Social media is an organic, interaction-based organism. Without an effort to intentionally include social media into a comprehensive web initiative from the ground up, it will suffer. So how exactly does user experience fit in with social media?
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We've all seen zombie copy--it's what lurks around the dark corners of even well-meaning websites. Copy they thought no one would read. Copy that was filled with over-used keywords and spicy catchphrases shoved into a faux-professional skin. Copy that, despite their best efforts, wasn't quite human.
It's usually the result of an attempt at content marketing via SEO, probably shrugged off because "no one reads that stuff anyway." It might even look good to other zombies, had they functional eyes and brains. But the problem is that mindless, impersonal, senseless copy drives away your mindful, wallet-watching customers.
And those are the ones that matter.
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You've probably heard about bounce rates, but do you know how they affect the success of your brand online?
Bounce rates measure the percentage of people who hit your site, view a single page, and then leave. In other words, if you have a high bounce rate, it means the majority of your visitors don't stick around to see what else is on your site. In general, this means that something could have been done better--you do want visitors to stick around, right? For this reason, your bounce rate is often used as a metric for the success of your site.
However, in certain instances, a high bounce rate could indicate that the information a visitor was seeking was quickly found--ideal, especially because it indicates a measure of user-friendliness. This is why you shouldn't take the number at face-value: a lower bounce rate doesn't always imply a more successful site. So how do you use this metric?
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You may have an excellent website up and running: sharp graphics, an intuitive user interface, plenty of SEO'd content. But unless you had the website professionally developed, it may be running slower than you think. And the longer the loading time, the less traffic you recieve, the lower the user satisfaction and likelihood of return, and the lower your search engine ranking will be.
How can you know if your site's loading time is driving traffic away? Here's three warning signs that your site is too slow.
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