Forum posting today has become critical to social media marketing efforts that boost business successes online. Forums act as an ideal marketing tool as they help you to learn and realize newer avenues available for marketing your business through constant interaction with other members of the forum. Forum posting doesn’t mean simply posting new threads or replying to old threads in order to get quality inbound links to a website. Forum posting should be done accurately to drive targeted traffic to your website and to strengthen your brand visibility in search engine rankings. However, if it is done indiscriminately, it could result in waste of time, which could have otherwise been spent on growing your business.
In addition, getting backlinks from forums with high page ranks will help in getting direct traffic to your website. However, at times there could be a possibility of your post being edited or deleted by the forum administrator if they find that your posting does not adhere to their forum policy. Also there may be times when administrators may not allow any links in posts until they are totally relevant. Therefore, it is important to be mindful of the kind of posts you make in forums in order to take advantage of them.

Importance of forum posting in social media marketing

In order to get the best results through forum posting, it is important to keep the following four points in mind:

1. Search Forums of high Google Page Rank – To get the maximum visibility and exposure, you must post in forums that have high Google Page Rank value and visitors. Try to find forums that have active conversations and high page views. If you end up posting in forums that have very less traffic, it will not help you maximize your results
2. Make your presence felt – It is also important to let people know who you are, especially when you are out there to promote your brand or build business relationships. You can add a more personal touch and connect with people when you post in forums by using your own name rather than a fictitious or funny name that disguises your identity. Moreover, people are more likely to connect to you when they know who you are. Additionally, uploading your photo can also help to increase the responsiveness of people to your postings.
3. No Direct Marketing: Please note that you cannot talk specifically about your product or sell your product in forums, as direct marketing is not allowed in most forums. You need to select the category in the forums related to your business and start a general conversation with the forum members. You can slowly start sharing your business information once your presence is felt and accepted in the forum. This ensures that you improve your business presence and trust among the forum members. Eventually, this networking and relationsip will help your brand strength and work towards gaining search engine rankings.
4. Append a signature file and a link to your website – A signature file is a pre-written personal footer that is used as a closing line for emails. This usually contains the name and address of the sender or any other text that the sender wishes to have as his closing line. You can use your signature file when you post in forums so that people can contact you if they are interested in your product. Also, posting a link  to your website in the signature file may help drive traffic and brand visibility.

Discussion boards are generally a highly targeted group of people that are more receptive to your products and services. Therefore commenting on forums is an effective way to promote your brand.

Contributed by Seethalakshmi

• SMB 2012 Marketing, Top 5 Online Trends This Year & much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• CPG Brands: Winning Big with Social Media Marketing (0)
• #OccupyWallStreet on Social Media, B2B Social Business Marketing & much more… | Best of the Week (0)

Wikipedia defines Web Analytics as, “the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so businesses can better understand the complex interactions between Web visitor actions and Web site offers, as well as leverage that insight for increased customer loyalty and sales.” Simply put, Web Analytics provides information about users of your website on the internet.

Web Analytics helps you understand the user’s experience on your website. Using this information, you can make modifications to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you get more website traffic. It not only gives information about the number of visitors to the site but gives a world of useful information like time every individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, and much more.

SEO importance of Web Analytics

The question here is how does Web Analytics help SEO? Here are some of the ways in which web analytics can influence your SEO campaign:

• Visitors to the site: The very basic of information, this tells you how many visitors came to your site in a given month. You can also compare the data with past information to see how the traffic to your website is growing over a period of time. You can identify trends and seasonality of visitors to your site. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.

• Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website.

• Domains that bring in traffic: Also called referrers, this is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.

• Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.

• Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.

There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.

Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:

In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.

If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through a Web Analytics solution, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.

Contributed by Sudeep Rao

• Dexter Goes Social, Social Media Etiquette and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• Social Media Trends and the Fashion Industry, Google+ Pages and much more… | Best of the Week (0)
• #OccupyWallStreet on Social Media, B2B Social Business Marketing & much more… | Best of the Week (0)