Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience



Nearly two-thirds of millennials report making over half of their purchasing decisions online. Even if they prefer to buy in-store, most people discover new brands through online marketing campaigns.

Jul 15, 2014 The map is extremely useful for targeting social and search ads—especially if you know the locations and languages of visitors most likely to convert using your Google Analytics goals. It can also come in handy for local businesses that want to know if their marketing efforts are driving traffic from the right regions, and for publishers who want to create content that is locally focused. For instance, you might build a segment of users who viewed your product pages for female yoga pants on Google Analytics. You can then target this segment with a Google Adwords remarketing campaign that showcases new items on those product pages. Secondly, you can better identify specific trends in your business.

More than ever before in history, we conduct a huge percentage of our lives online. We shop online. We discover businesses online. And, yes, we make a large chunk of our social interactions online.

Everyone from small business owners to megacorporate entities, independent creators, and freelancers need to optimize their digital presence. A big part means curating one’s impact through data analytics.

Using

So, what is audience analytics? Audience analytics is the art of processing raw, unfiltered data to discover trends about site visitors and clients. Through web analytics, site owners can better understand their core audience’s wants, interests, and beliefs. Here is an example:

It’s not enough to rely on hear-say or anecdote anymore. Right at their fingertips, site owners can tap into powerful demographic and behavioral information concerning their clients.

Want to become competitive? You’ll need to use services like Google Analytics to their fullest potential.

Below, we’ll touch on what Google Analytics is, why it’s useful, and how to get started with your new GA account. Then, we’ll deep-dive into the best strategies to squeeze the most out of your Google Analytics audience.

What is Google Analytics?

Acquired from Urchin Software Corp. in 2005, Google built on the dual ideas of client demographics and data analytics to develop Google Analytics (GA). Since then, the little-known software application has reigned supreme among site owners that want to understand their audience.

Unlike the bygone analytics apps offered by IBM, WebTrends, and WebSideStory, Google sought to provide a free analytics platform for site owners.

As the years have passed, GA has only gotten more sophisticated and extensible. Late 2009 saw the introduction of a novel AdSense feature, which helped site owners measure site performance and financial return on investment (ROI). For instance:

More recent releases allowed owners to segment site visitors by their demographic information. GA now uses cookie information to gauge unique visitors, returning clients, and clients segregated by location. Faster data visualization and SEO fine-tuning can now be accomplished through a paired-down analytics interface.

Companies and independent entrepreneurs alike rely on web analytics to tailor the products and services they offer. Even marketers regularly rely on GA to design more attention-grabbing ads, webpages, and sites. In such a hugely competitive digital landscape, those that don’t utilize analytics are left behind.

How Popular is Google Analytics?

According to W3Techs, GA is now used by 52.9 percent of all websites in the world – officially, that makes it ten times as popular as the second-most frequented application Yandex Metrics.

Features like real-time reporting, tag management, and event tracking all brought GA to prominence over its fiercest competitors. There’s no time like now to integrate GA tracking to your online platform.

How To Set Up Google Analytics for Your Platform

Perhaps Google Analytics is so compelling because it’s easy for even the least technically proficient site owners to set up themselves.

To get started collecting basic site data, you’ll need to connect a GA tracking tag to all of your relevant site pages. As visitors explore your site, their demographic information, clicks, and behavior are all synced with your GA account through the embedded tag.

To get started, follow these simple instructions through Google Analytics:

  1. Create a new Analytics account or log-in to google.com/analytics (Here is what the sign-up page should look like):
  1. Create a new Property inside your Analytics account, which signifies your unique site or app and serves as the collection point
  2. Inside your Property, set up a reporting view that lets you filter different data perspectives
  3. Add the tracking code (GA tag) to your website so that you can start aggregating user data

You can find your tracking code inside the Property tab that represents your site. Your tracking ID is displayed prominently at the top of the tab while the global site tag can be found under Website Tracking > Global Site Tag.

(Image credit: Google Support)

Once you’ve copied your global site tag, you or the development team will need to paste into each web page you’d like to collect data on. The relevant code block can be found right under the Global Site Tag on GA. (Look at the image above for an example.)

How data is collected will differ depending on whether your site is static, dynamic, hosted through an external service, or created with a content management system (CMS). Thankfully, Google provides rich documentation on how to integrate the tracking code with service providers like WordPress, Shopify, GoDaddy, and more.

When in doubt, make sure to reference Google’s Analytics Help that answers most questions within the realm of possibility.

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The Best Google Analytics Audience Practices

Below, we’ll dive into the most tried-and-true Google Analytics practices for better understanding your website’s clientele. Without a thought-out plan and reporting procedure, you’re essentially stumbling in the dark when it comes to optimizing conversion rates.

Remember, Google Analytics is only as functional as the ones using it.

Drill Down On Your Plan

Before you go off the deep end setting up a complicated reporting procedure, you’ll need to gain clarity around your strategy. A well-defined measurement plan helps you measure your online platform’s efficacy and performance over time.

Consider these key questions:

  • What is my business’ ultimate goal?
  • What action do I want site visitors to take when they land on my platform?
  • What are the missions and values of my brand?
  • What analytics data am I curious about? What do I most want to know about my customers on a broad level?
  • For my platform, what is audience analytics used for?
  • How can I gauge directly what metrics relate to my fundamental goals?

You may want to draw out a simple table or mind map outlining your goals. For instance, consider the example of a mid-sized e-commerce site.

An e-commerce platform will, first and foremost, want to generate sales and continued growth. Increased sales can be fostered through revenue generation and bolstering recurring customer purchases.

Sub-goals may include increasing the customer base associated with a specific region and increasing the revenue related to a particular product. Related goals will relate to building a recognizable brand, increasing customer loyalty, and encouraging a social community around the company.

The e-commerce platform will have to identify metrics that clearly relate to their primary goals. They will pay attention to measurements related to transactions, organic sessions, percentage of new versus returning visitors, and the site referral type.

Try to categorize metrics by what primary goal they’re directly associated with. For instance, a business stakeholder will want to know about revenue generation associated with a specific site referral link, while the site developer will want to analyze metrics around page response time.

Create a plan that separates reports based on how they relate to your fundamental goals. Once you’ve got a clear plan in order, it’s time to optimize your site for more effective report generation.

Understand Audience Overview

If you’ve just launched your first Property tag on Google Analytics, you may be frantically searching the web for “google analytics audience overview not working”.

Confused? Take a step back and breathe for a second. If you’re searching “google analytics audience overview not working”, keep in mind that standard reports may have a two to three-day data processing latency. Metrics like traffic, sessions, and bounce rate may not be accurate for several days (yet most measures catch up within ten to fifteen minutes).

The Audience Overview is the base-level, absolute view of your site’s performance over time. Site owners can look at data concerning their users, new users, session lengths, number of sessions per user, and page views. Take a look at this Audience Overview with a focus on the Bounce Rate:

(Image Credit: Mangools)

The Bounce Rate should be of particular interest – this metric measures the number of visitors that land on your site but leave before interacting with it. If you have a one-page site, it’s perfectly normal to have a high bounce rate.

Your Audience Overview can help you better-gauge the metrics you’d like to fine-tune your Google Analytics reporting for. Always keep them in mind as you develop segments, filters, and event tags, which we’ll dive into below.

Track Interactions Through Event Marking

Google Analytics allows you to track specific events each time a user performs them. It should go without saying that this is tremendously helpful in terms of understanding your site’s audience.

You can set up an Event Tracking view with four distinct parameters: label, value, action, and category. For Example:

(Image Credit: Hallam Internet)

Setting up an event allows you to separate certain occurrences by pre-defined types. Without creating event tags, any behavior that a user performs (such as a click) is logged, yet can be difficult for site owners to understand.

Want to track how often a site visitor downloaded a specific file? You could create a new event tag that categorizes the click as a “file click” under the action “download” with the label “company brochure”.

Labels are used to categorize specific events while categories help siloe events into similar types. Optionally, value can be used as some measure associated with the event, such as “amount of seconds the user watched a video” or “time in seconds for the video player to load”.

Consider the types of events that are unique to your platform. For example, an e-commerce site would be interested in when products are added to or removed from the customer’s cart.

You can even tag certain events to remove them from overall Google Analytics event tracking. Since event tracking is technically considered a client request, many site owners manually tag event tracking itself so that it won’t impact bounce rate metrics.

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Filter Your Data

Through Google Analytics, you can filter your data to limit what is included in a report. One or more filters can be combined advantageously.

(Image Credit: Bounteous)

Currently, GA offers eight different methods of inclusion and exclusion-based filtration, including search-and-replace, advanced filtering, external-internal traffic, domain references, filter-on geography, custom fields, and social network filtering.

Unlike segmenting, view filters modify the data that’s available in a generated report. Small sites often exclude traffic generated from their own device or organization, which makes analyzing client data much cleaner in the future.

With a pre-defined filter, you can choose to include or exclude data based on ISP domain, sub-directories, IP addresses, and hostname.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience

We suggest you start by excluding internal traffic, standardizing the case on search terms, and adding your domain name to reports. This will help your data better reflect actual usage patterns and behavior.

Filtering is just one way that site owners understand audience destinations Google Analytics trends.

Segment Your Data

Segments refer to subsections of your analytics data that provide meaningful insights concerning your audience. You can create segments based on your client’s location or the type of actions the client performs.

Without a doubt, segmenting your data is one of the best ways to identify new trends and uncover patterns. While Google Analytics provides default segments, custom segments allow you to more powerfully understand your audience.

Many site owners create a segment that filters out data from spam URL websites, which helps them gauge more properly the actual size of their audience.

Experts recommend segmenting data based on conversions, bounced sessions, branded versus non-branded traffic, and traffic source. Audience destinations Google Analytics can be very useful.

Use Analytics Intelligence Properly

Google Analytics intelligence is one of the newest features of the GA platform. The machine learning tool helps site owners to better craft reports and tap into meaningful insights.

Inside your Property view, a search bar allows you to pose questions to the AI. The AI can answer a huge range of questions in simple language, providing a quick overview that links to a full report. This is what the search bar will look like:

(Image Credit: CXL)

Try asking questions like:

  • Why did my traffic drop last month?
  • What referral source resulted in the best conversion rate in 2017?
  • Graph session length of users in Chicago versus New York for last week
  • What percentage of sessions are from women?
  • Did any anomalies occur in traffic last week?

You can ask questions that require a comparison of data for different values, shares, percentages, or complex multi-part questions. This allows e-commerce site owners, advertisers, and publishers to get answers concerning the most needed knowledge.

Google Analytics intelligence will also provide unprompted insights under the Insights tab. These reports are automatically generated to warn you about recent changes in user behavior, conversion rates, and session length. Here is what the insights could look like:

(Image credit: Google Support)

Share Your Insights

One reason that Google Analytics is so widely used is that collected data can be easily imported and exported. Curious about the Google Analytics export audience? Want to know how to import an audience from analytics to adwords? Listen up.

Google Analytics export audience allows you to create a report that can be shared with others. The reports can be specified over data range and other useful metrics for company stakeholders or your own recordkeeping purposes.

To properly export, open up the report of interest. Keep in mind that all data, regardless of filter options, is displayed on screen – you’ll want to double-check that you’ve set the proper data range and report settings.

Across from the report title, click Export. You can select Google Analytics audiences output formats like TSV, CSV, Excel sheets, Google Sheets, and PDF.

It’s also possible to share reports with up to 400 email addresses. Reports can be automatically generated and sent-off based on predetermined time periods.

We also suggest that you import audiences from analytics to adwords. This allows you to access your Google Analytics conversions and data associated with ad clicks. Site bidding AI can be used to optimize bids that directly increase conversions while mitigating costs.

Creating exports and imports is an important (and useful) feature of the Google Analytics platform. While exports make it easy to share insights across a team of developers, imports allow you to better track conversions and lead generation.

Diib®: Get to Know Your Google Analytics Audience!

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for both business leaders and site owners. Make sure to use it wisely by generating meaningful reports, segmenting your data, creating filters, and leaning on Google AI. Diib Digital provides actionable insights into all the metrics we’ve talked about. Some of the features we know you’ll love about our user dashboard include:

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  • Technical SEO monitoring

Click here for your free scan or simply call 800-303-3510 to speak to one of our growth experts.

FAQ’s

It can be difficult to customize your content based on your users and their behavior. Here are some of the steps to optimize your content: 1) Set up a date range and advanced segment. 2) Create attainable goals. 3) Use Drilldown Report to analyze performance and get new ideas for content. 4) Create a custom dimension in the case of many blog authors. 5) Use Site Search Report for content ideation and creation.

The “audience” tab lets you search your customers, getting familiar with demographics like: location, retention and device technology. “Acquisition” will give you an idea of how customers find your site. “Behavior” explains how customers act once they get to your site.

With the use of a unique tracking code, Google Analytics tracks all data on every page of your website.

GA provides many insights into your website. With this info, you can easily target those who are likely to convert. You can adjust your campaign according to this information.

This is calculated by subtracting the initial value of the investment from the final value of the investment. Then divide the new number by the cost of investment.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, it can be a little daunting at first. With so much data available to dig through, it’s hard to know where to look to find the most important metrics.

Marketers that want to better understand their audience, and strengthen their marketing strategy, need to know how to best utilize all of the data available inside Google Analytics.

Without knowing which sections to pay attention to, you could spend hours digging through the platform and walk away with your head spinning.

Similarly, without analyzing your website traffic, it’s hard to assess the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and know when it’s time to make a shift.

If leveraged correctly, Google Analytics can provide valuable insight into who visits your website, how they got there in the first place and what pages they spend the most time on; this is powerful data for marketers that can be used to enhance their strategy.

An Overview

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses alike. Through use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your marketing and business development strategies.

The back end of Google Analytics is broken down into eight main sections: Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.

Almost all eight sections contain sub-sections that provide a ton of data, but not all sections are critical for marketers to pay attention to.

Before we dive in to the sections that matter most to marketers, let’s get familiar with some basic Google Analytics terminology:

  • Users: These are people who have visited at least once within your selected date range, and includes both new and returning visitors.
  • Dimensions: These are descriptive characteristics of an object. For example, browser, exit page and session duration are all considered dimensions.
  • Metrics: These are individual statistics of a dimension, such as Average Session Duration or Screenviews.
  • Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of single-page visits, meaning that someone left your site from the same page at which they entered; aka, they didn’t interact with your site.
  • Sessions: A session is the period of time that a user is actively engaged with your website.

Now that you’re familiar with the Google Analytics sections and terminology, let’s dive in to the areas that you want to pay most attention to in order to save time and strengthen your marketing strategy.

Zeroing in on what matters most

There are three sections that matter most to marketers: Acquisition, Audience and Behavior.

The Audience section provides a tremendous amount of data about your website visitors. It contains multiple subsections that provide information about the gender, age and location of your website visitors. You can also uncover information about their interests, as well as the browsers and mobile devices used to access your site.

The Acquisition section will provide detailed information about how people arrive to your site. Digging in to the “All Traffic” tab will show you exactly how people are arriving at your website – whether it be a search engine, social media site or blog that you’re a contributor for.

The Behavior section helps you understand how people are interacting with your site. You’ll visit this section to better understand which pages on your website are the most popular.

Focusing on these three sections will help you save time when digging through Google Analytics.

When used together, the information uncovered can help you make decisions about which marketing efforts (be it guest blogging or social media posting,) are most useful in driving website traffic.

Analyzing these sections within Google Analytics will provide you with insight that will enable you to make smarketing (smart, marketing) decisions about the type, tone, and placement of content that you use on your website.

Traffic Channels

Before we dive into who exactly is visiting your site, it’s important to understand how they’re getting there.

To see your various traffic sources for a set period of time, go to the Acquisition tab and click the “All Traffic” dropdown. Select the “Channels” button, set the time period at the top of the viewing pane and scroll down to see the results for the give timeframe.

Here’s a simple breakdown of what these different channels mean:

  • Direct: Visitors that came directly to your website. They either typed your URL right into their browser, clicked on a bookmark or clicked a link in an email. Direct traffic is a strong indicator of the strength of your brand.
  • Organic Search: You can thank search engines like Google and Bing for these website visitors. An organic visitor is someone who got to your website by clicking on a link from a search engine results page. A lot of organic traffic is a strong indicator of the value of your content and SEO strategy.
  • Paid Search: You’ll find any paid search (think Google AdWords) campaigns in this viewing pane. A lot of paid search traffic means that you’re Google AdWords are working well.
  • Referral: This represents visitors that clicked a link on another site to land on your website. Years ago, before social media was what it is today, all other traffic (that wasn’t direct or organic) fell under the referral tab. Within the past few years, Google created a separate tab for social traffic, which makes it easy for marketers to focus in on just the websites that are driving traffic to their site. If you guest blog, this is the section to visit to see how much traffic is being driven to your site from your guest blogging efforts. A lot of referral traffic means that you’re being talked about (and linked to) from multiple other websites.
  • Social: As a social media marketer, this is my favorite section within Google Analytics because it shows me exactly what social media channels drive the majority of traffic to my site. This data can be used to shape your social media strategy.
  • Email: The number of visitors that came to your website from an email campaign. If you do a lot of email marketing, you’ll want to dig through here to see how effective your campaigns are.

Looking at the traffic channels will allow you to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the Channels are listed in order of driving power; the Channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

To dig deeper into the data, click each Channel to see more information.

For example, when I click Social, I can see the entire list of social media sites (again, listed in order of most to least powerful) that drove traffic to my website during the selected timeframe.

Analyzing the power of different channels will help you decide which efforts to focus on, and potentially spark ideas to increase traffic from other channel types.

Here are a few ideas to increase traffic across all channel types:

  • Direct: Share the link to your website with friends and family the next time you’re with them. Tell them to type it directly into their browser and voila! You just got a nice direct traffic boost.
  • Organic Search: Make sure that you’re utilizing H1 and H2 tags, meta descriptions and keywords in all of your website pages and content updates. The stronger your SEO, the greater likelihood that someone will find you on a search engine.
  • Paid Search: Try adjusting your keywords and/or targeting options to make your ads more relevant.
  • Referral: Start reaching out to popular blogs and forums in your industry to see if you can guest post or perhaps be featured on their site. Contributing content to other sites is a great way to increase your referral traffic.
  • Social: Increasing the frequency of your posting, and the number of links you share on social media will undoubtedly result in a boost of social traffic. I recommend increasing your efforts on one channel at a time to see what drives the largest impact. For example, make February your Twitter month; aim to tweet a lot of links that drive back to your website and at the end of the month, analyze the website traffic. Then, come March, turn that attention over to Facebook and see which social channel drove more traffic.
  • Email: Start including more calls to action and links in your email campaigns. Make sure that your calls to action stand out in your email templates and serve to drive people back to your website.

Once you’ve implemented some of these ideas, take the time to review the Channels breakdown again to see the impact of your efforts.

If your efforts to grow traffic from one channel go unnoticed in your analytics, try a different one!

For example, let’s say you have a ton of referral traffic and very little organic traffic. If your attempts to improve SEO and grow organic traffic have little impact, it’s probably not worth the effort. You’re better off continuing to guest blog, as it’s proven to be a critical marketing activity that is worth your time and effort.

Audience Demographics

Understanding who is visiting your site in terms of their age, location and gender is the best way to tailor your site to suit their interests and preferences.

If you want your website content and imagery to appease and resonate with your audience, you need to know who they are.

To find this information, head over to the Audience tab. You’ll want to focus on the sub-sections of Demographics and Geo.

First, let’s look at the Demographics of Age and Gender.

As you can see, the majority of my website visitors are aged 25-34, followed by those aged 35-44.

Knowing this, I aim to create content that is geared towards, and valued by, young professionals. Some examples are tips for professional development and advice for managers leading a team of employees.

Understanding how old your website visitors are, and whether they’re male or female, is helpful if you’re looking to capture their attention when they land on your site.

For example, if 90% of your website visitors are women, you could deliver a more personalized website experience for them by starting your “About” or “Welcome” page with “Hey ladies!”

Through analyzing the Gender section, I can see that the majority of my site visitors are female. It’s not skewed too heavily though, so I don’t want to tailor my site to females only. That’s why I’ve chosen my website colors to be black, white and green; I wanted to create a sleek and clean aesthetic that would be appealing to both men and women.

Digging in to the age and gender of your website visitors is useful if you want to craft creative content for your blog posts and website pages that captures their attention and gains their trust.

For example, telling your fans to “Treat yo self” to a free guide on your website isn’t going to resonate with individuals in their 60’s. However, it WILL get a chuckle from millennials.

Finally, you want to look to see where your website visitors are from. Looking at the Location tab under the “Geo” dropdown will show you the countries, states and cities of your website audience.

When you first click “Location” you’ll be shown the list of countries. Not surprisingly, the majority of my website visitors are from the United States.

Looking at the different states is a great way to gain insight that can be levered for any AdWords or paid Facebook campaigns you’re going to run. You want to target those states and cities that you see are frequenting your site.

I can see that New York dominates the results by a large margin. That’s not surprising since I live there and the majority of my mentors, friends and family live in New York as well.

Clicking on the individual states will bring you to the list of cities, within that state, that your website visitors come from.

Since I currently live in Buffalo, I’m not surprised to see Buffalo and other Western New York cities at the top of the list. I also see New York City, which is expected since that is where the majority of my friends and family reside.

If you don’t see your city as the top city, you might want to consider shifting your marketing strategy, and content, to target those in your geographic area.

Content Drilldown

Last but not least, it’s important to dive in to the content to see which pages people spend the most and least time on.

To do this, click the Behavior tab and go to the Site Content drop-down. You’ll want to look at the Content Drilldown, as well as Landing and Exit Pages to see which pages are most viewed on your website.

Content Drilldown is the overview of which pages on your website are visited the most.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Analysis

Using

Seeing which pages, and blog posts, are most viewed by your audience is helpful in guiding your web development strategy; you want to create more of what works.

Through analysis, I can see that my homepage and services page are the most popular. I can also see that the page on my site that has all of my marketing blogs is more popular that the blog page itself, which shows me that my audience values marketing content.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Profile

Now, you want to head over to the Landing Pages view in order to see what pages people are landing on when they get to your site.

The Landing Pages view is a good indicator of the effectiveness of your social media and promotional strategy, as you hope to see the blogs and website pages promoted most at the top.

For me, that would be my homepage, services page, free social media guide page and Bravery Beats blog post. Those pages are the ones that I promote the most, as they provide the most value and information that I find relevant for my audience.

It’s important to me to see my free social media guide at the top of the landing page list, as this page is a free giveaway that I’m using in part to provide value, and in part to build my email list.

Analyzing the traffic of this page is a good way for me to assess both the value and popularity of the giveaway.

If you don’t see your most important and/or promoted blog posts and website pages in the list of the top ten landing pages, it’s time to either reevaluate their value and/or your promotional strategy to ensure you’re driving traffic to those pages through social media and email marketing campaigns.

Spending time in the behavior section will allow you to develop an awareness of what content your website visitors find the most valuable. You can use this as a guide for what works (and what doesn’t) when it comes to blog topics and page types.

For example, if you notice that the top visited pages are all blog posts about social media, yet none of your design blogs are ranking in the top, you want to spend more time blogging about social than you do about design.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Without

By paying attention to the demographics of your audience, you’ll be able to create content and imagery that you know your audience desires. This allows you to craft a customized and relevant site experience for your audience that will keep them coming back for more. (Thereby increasing your direct traffic!)

When you start monitoring your referral traffic, you’ll start to see which guest blogs are helping to increase your online visibility. This will help you save time by focusing only on the guest blogs that provide a return (in the form of website visits) on your content creation efforts. Similarly, by diving in to your social referrals, you’ll be armed with data to decide exactly which social media channels are the best to share your blog posts on.

By utilizing, analyzing, and focusing on these various sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a deep understanding of who your audience is, what they want and how they find you.

Using Google Analytics To Build Your Audience Network

About the Author: Julia Jornsay-Silverberg is a social media marketing consultant and coach with a passion for helping small businesses use social media to build brand awareness and connect with customers. Check out her free guide, “Socially Strategic” to help you get started strategically on social media. You can also find her on Twitter and Periscope.