On the flip side of yesterday’s post, Why Understanding Your Customers is Vital to Your Social Media Strategy, social media can also be an extremely powerful tool for understanding your customers. Before the wide-spread use of social media, companies would have to spend thousands of dollars on having market research, surveys, studies, etc. done so they could understand what their customers wanted and were willing to pay for. This pretty much left any type of customer or market research in the hands of large companies who could afford to pay for the information. With social media you’re able to gather much of this information directly by finding, listening and asking your customers online.
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eCommerce
Why RSS Is Still Important for Your Business
In case you missed it, there’s been some talk lately about whether or not RSS is dead. You may be wondering exactly what RSS is — RSS stands for Really Simply Syndication (sometimes just called a feed) and it’s a method for one website to send out it’s content in a way that other websites and programs can easily read. RSS feeds make it really easy for people to subscribe to your website and get updates via email or RSS readers (such as Google Reader or iGoogle). Whether or not RSS is used directly by people, RSS is still important for your business because it used behind the scenes by many websites, applications and social networks vital to your online presence.
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Is Exit Rate a Useful Metric?
Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages. The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point. What if they came, bought something and then left? That’s what you want them to do. Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave. While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful? Yes and no. Let’s look at it in more detail…
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