And oh yes, we meet up in person. You might say we “tweet up.”

Events, both hosting and attending them, are key to a successful social media strategy. By meeting someone IRL (“In Real Life”), your relationship with that person strengthens naturally. Even if you spend only a couple of minutes together, you’re able to read each other’s body language, maybe share a couple of stories and ultimately establish a human bond that is impossible to achieve online.

At ChicagoNow, the web site I worked at before joining 435 Digital, events were essential to growing our online community. When we launched the site in May 2009, we wanted the bloggers to regularly link to each other, comment on each other’s posts and even collaborate. The best way to do that, we decided, was to introduce the bloggers to each other in person and hope they clicked.

So, borrowing a line from the brilliant Andrew Huff of Gapers Block, we began holding monthly meet-ups. Each month, we invited the ChicagoNow bloggers to join the ChicagoNow staff for drinks and conversation at a bar in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. ChicagoNow picked up the tab and staff members introduced bloggers to each other, making sure everyone felt included.

My favorite part of a meet-up goes something like this:

A talk man with gray hair turns to the young woman next to him. “Hi, I’m Joe. I write the blog ‘Arresting Tales.’ I don’t think we’ve met.”

The woman’s eyes light up. “Joe! I know you! I’m Jessica. I’m ‘All the Single Ladies.‘”

The man gasps. “Jessica! It’s so good to finally meet you in person!”

Turns out they’d been commenting on each other’s blogs for weeks. They’ll now spend the next 20 minutes exchanging funny stories and deciding how they can collaborate on future posts. A friendship that was two-dimensional online suddenly becomes three-dimensional offline.

Don’t believe me? Then I invite you to attend tomorrow’s ChicagoNow Tweet-Up and see for yourself. We’ll be gathering for free drinks, food and lots of conversation at Sub 51 from 6 to 8 p.m. You can RSVP on ChicagoNow’s Faceook fan page and yes, you can bring your friends. Online ones and off.

-Tracy Samantha Schmidt

The post Social Media A-Z: E is for Events appeared first on 435 Digital.

How does it work?

You can simply fire up Facebook for I-Phone or you can go to touch.facebook.comto access Places. From there you can search for places of interest around your immediate location and let people know where you are by checking in. If a place is not listed you can also create it with ease. Additionally, your check-ins are posted as status updates for all your friends to see.

On Deals you can choose from four types of promotions and give you total control of how customers can redeem these specials. What’s super surprising is that you can set up these deals for free.

The introduction of Deals shows that Facebook is ready to go toe-to-toe with Foursquare and further rolls the ball on giving businesses their own power to advertise. This also gives another tool for small businesses to compete by immediately offering discounts the larger companies can’t match.

What I love about this development is that shops, restaurants and boutiques could enter the social space without the pressure of maintaining a Facebook Fan Page. While there needs to be strong strategy behind these promotions, Deals could be a stand alone option or an incredible complimentary asset to their social media campaign.

I am also waiting for the time when people are giving silly discounts when someone checks in to their kitchen.

-PEDRO CASTRO

The post 435 Social Media A-Z: D is for Deals on Facebook appeared first on 435 Digital.

Twitter has made it super easy to share links, photos and other content with your friends on Internet. However since Twitter restricts you to 140 characters you have to make the most out of your post.

You’ve probably seen something like this before.

While the URL is interesting it takes up 81 characters. It also screams “NOOOOOOOB!” to all your followers.

What Bit.ly, Ow.ly, TinyUrl do is shorten the URL to make it more space friendly on Twitter.

All you have to do is copy and paste your link on the shortener field

And it will convert your long as nails link into …

… A tight bottle of link juice.

What’s also cool is that Bit.ly in particular also has a decent analytics system tracking shares, clicks and comments on the link.

The next time you share a link on Twitter, be sure to use a URL shortener.
So you can save room for your funny micro-commentary.

Try out any of the links here.
http://bit.ly
http://ow.ly
http://tinyurl

Want to recommend one to us?
Hit me up at pedro@435digital.com.—PEDRO CASTRO

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Web analytics are important for optimizing web usage and play an important role in everything from marketing to accounting. Even if a company has a person solely dedicated to maintaining analyitcs, it is important for everyone to have a basic understanding to learn more about your consumer.

There are a lot of different dimensions to web analytics, but to start off, the three most important stats on are bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit the site after the landing page. Like your golf score, you want your website bounce rate to be low. The main objective should be for visitors to click on other pages to your site from the landing page. A simple way to do this is to add hyperlinks into your website copy directing traffic to other areas of the website. It is important for all internal hyperlinks to open up in the same window to decrease site bounce rate. Landing pages can be customized based on keywords when the traffic source is from a search engine.

Though a valuable statistic, bounce rate can be misleading if the landing page is a homepage with a substantial amount of information or a blog. This is when “time on site” becomes useful. Similar to bounce rate, looking at a website’s “time on site” data, one can tell how long visitors are spending on a website and in what areas. This is especially important for businesses to learn the wants and needs of their consumers. 435Digital.com’s analytics indicate visitors want to learn more about social media through our blog posts, hence the creation of Social Media A-Z.

While it is important to know where people are spending their time, it is essential to know who is visiting your site. Unique visitors are the number of unduplicated visitors to your website in a given time. Analytics usually break down data every 24 hours and categorize it by month. Therefore, a unique visitor will only be counted once per day but may visit your site twice a week. To know how many “regulars” your website has, analyze the new vs. returning data.

To get an idea on how many times a person visits your website, divide total visits by unique visitors to get “average number of sessions per unique visitor.”  Knowing how often people visit your site can help you determine how many times you should update your content.

If you or employees visit your website frequently, it is important to make sure these are not interfering with your web analytics. To make sure you are getting the most accurate information install filters on certain IP addresses.

The most popular analytics platform is Google Analyics. It allows you to add a filter in your analtyics settings by going to your filter manager and clicking, create new filter. Depending on what IP address you are blocking, you can name the filter: home computer, work, laptop etc. Google has made it easy by doing the work for you, simply select predefined filter and type in the IP address.

Web analytics are a very powerful tool that when utilized can improve your business and highlight needs you may not have otherwise identified. To get a basic understanding, it is important to know your website’s bounce rate, time on site and unique visitors… and of course, keep reading 435′s Social Media A-Z!—DANNI WYSOKI

The post 435 Social Media A-Z: A is for Analytics appeared first on 435 Digital.