Although opening your website up to critique may be painful, it’s better than a website that doesn’t provide what your visitors are looking for, as so cleverly illustrated by Randall Munroe at XKCD:

Source: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com

Even if you’re a small business, user testing is an important tool to help you figure out what’s working –and what’s not working– with your site. Heck, we design websites for a living and even though we know a lot about it, we still had our own site tested.

By watching people navigate around your site (people who are completely unaffiliated with it) you’ll be able to answer questions like:

• Within the first 15 seconds, do users understand what our company does and our product or service can benefit them?
• Can they quickly navigate to an area that has information specific to them?
• Do they engage with your site?
• Is it easy for them to contact you for more information?

The good news is it doesn’t have to cost you a lot–there are several reasonably-priced online resources. Here are a few of them:

• Crazyegg - monthly service that shows a “heat map” of where people click on your site.
• FeedbackArmy – for only $20, you submit questions about your site and get 10 written responses.
• UserTesting.com – provides a video of how the user navigated through the site, as well as written responses.
• TryMyUI - this is the one that we used, and they provide the first one free. (If you’d like to see what our test looked like, just email us.)

Before you get started, make sure you know the following:

• User names and passwords for your social media accounts.
• Employees who will serve as company page admins.
• Pictures (click for a bit more on this)
  • Logo files and staff photos sized to 200 x 200 pixels in JPG, PNG or GIF format
  • Product photos sized to 100×80 pixels
• Two company descriptions
  • A short version in 160 characters or less
  • A longer version in ~150 words or less
• Product and/or service descriptions in ~150 words or less

 

LinkedIn

We assume that you have a basic, free account. LinkedIn offers several subscription levels that can help with tasks like finding talent and facilitating sales.  When editing the basic LinkedIn company profile, there are two essential tabs to update: Overview and Products & Services. To make changes, click on Admin Tools > Edit.

Overview Tab

Review and correct all of the general information about your company, and double-check these:

• Company page admins—Be careful here…if you choose the option for “all employees with a valid email registered to the company domain” it means any employee who has a LinkedIn account with an @yourcompany.com email address can make changes.
• Logo upload—you can upload both a full size version of your logo (displayed on the company page profile) and a square version (displayed on company updates).

Products & Services Tab

If it’s been a while since you’ve visited your company LinkedIn page, you probably don’t even realize these exist.  Click on Admin tools > Add a product or service and follow the instructions. You’ll be able to upload an image, add a description and more.

Facebook

Like LinkedIn, there are plenty of options for customizing your company page, but we’ll stick with just the basics to keep the task manageable for you.

Facebook Username

One of the most important first steps you can take is to make sure that your company page has its own username—without a username, only people who are logged into Facebook can view it. All you need to do is to get 25 people to like your page, then go to www.facebook.com/usernames to set one up.

Use Facebook as a Page

To edit a company page, a designated page administrator must first log into their individual Facebook account, then switch to “Use Facebook as: your company’s name here page”.  Once there, click on Edit Page and, at the very least, edit these areas:

• Basic Information—make sure you’ve entered your business category and sub-categories, address, and both a company description.
• Profile Picture—upload your logo.
• Manage Admins—designate the people who can edit your page, and keep in mind that they will not be publicly affiliated with the company unless you go to the Featured tab and enable that feature.

When you’ve finished editing that section, click on View Page to return to the basic mode. If you want to add staff, product, or other photos, click on the Photos tab and upload.

Important: be a good citizen and make sure to “like” your client and business partner’s pages. They’re hoping to improve their social media campaign, too.

Twitter

Twitter is the easiest of these to update, since it has the fewest options. The most important part of your Twitter update is to activate every opportunity to auto-post your Tweets to your other social media accounts. Once you’ve logged into your company’s page go the Settings area and edit:

• Profile—upload your logo, and your website and company description in less than 160 characters. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and make sure you follow the instructions to post your tweets on your Facebook wall.
• Applications—make sure to allow LinkedIn and Facebook to access your account.

Be a good citizen on Twitter, too, and make sure you follow all of your clients and business partners.

Wasn’t that easy?

Of course, there’s a lot more to a savvy social media campaign than this, but this will at least cover the basics. Your next step is to bestow a “Social Media Champion” (or some other zippy-sounding) title on one of your lucky staff members and task them with implementing a proper social media campaign.

PS. Here’s some more info about pictures.

Earlier, we kept it simple and told you to size all of your logo and headshot images to 200×200. For those of you who might want to know just a little bit more about social media images, here you go.

LinkedIn

• In the company page, you can upload two different sizes, both your standard logo, which can be any dimension, and a square logo.
• A person’s profile picture usually displays an 80×80 thumbnail, but in some views users can click to enlarge the photo to 200×200.

Facebook

• The full-size logo that visitors see in the upper left column of a company page can be 200px wide by varying height, but people will most often see the 50×50 icon in your updates.  Some businesses get creative so that it looks good both ways–see the Victoria’s Secret Facebook page for an example.
• Photos uploaded to photo albums, they can be almost any dimension, just keep in mind there’s a 4MG upload limit. If you have several photos, they’ll look best if you size them consistently.

Twitter

• Displays two sizes, 73×73 and 48×48.
• If you want to get fancy, you can have a background designed that includes photos.

Strategies for mobile, video and social media marketing are on everybody’s Top 10 Marketing Trends list.

However, they won’t be effective unless you’ve addressed these underlying issues.

• The customer is still #1 – you must understand your customers’ needs and motivations as well as their process for gathering information and making decisions.
• Content marketing – relevant content has always been vital to web traffic, but it’s more important than ever, both for your website and your social media pages. Case studies and white papers are an important part of the marketing mix…but not the dry old things of yore. New styles are more dynamic, engaging and appeal to the various ways adults absorbs info.
• Cloud computing – cloud technologies abound that help marketers to track leads, test channels and manage customer relationships, and “freemium” models make it easy to try.
• Search – search engines are still the #1 source of website traffic for most businesses, so you can’t ignore it.

Once you’ve got those items figured out, you can move on to these:

• Smartphone Apps – mobile users are nuts about them, and the trend only looks to gain momentum. Per
• Mobile strategy – experts say that by 2015 more people will access the Web via mobile device than desktop…which gives you a little bit of time to get a strategy together, but you’ll probably have to break down and address this eventually.
• Video strategy– there are more videos on YouTube than there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy (seriously!) Videos like product demos and video testimonials are becoming de rigueur on websites.
• Social media strategy done right – we emphasize the “done right” because so much of it is done wrong…it’s a relationship-building platform, not a sales platform. Converse more, promote less.

“This is totally cool–10 years ago when I started Spot as a one-woman-show out of my basement, I had no idea that it would evolve so far. I feel so much gratitude for our wonderful clients and awesome team!”

We absolutely adore Stay Pet Hotel, a boutique all-inclusive dog boarding hotel. Take a tour of the place and you will want to stay there–perhaps in one of their suites complete with couches and flat-screen televisions.

Of course, those details are probably lost on the dogs. They are too busy romping with their buddies in one of the large outdoor exercise areas.

Located in North Portland, it’s consistently voted the #1 dog boarding facility in Portland by SPOT Magazine (a publication that we think has the best name ever!)

She’s revised the book and it is planned to launch in January 2012, so to anyone who wants to improve your sales performance: keep your eyes peeled, we’ll make sure to announce it.

UPDATE: Sharon really has her act together–thanks to her decisiveness and enthusiastic participation in the process, the Sparker Coaching site actually went live ahead of schedule in mid-December 2011.