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The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option.

it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

Many consider these to be vanity metrics: measures which are easy to understand but on their own explain little about the actionable effect.  They are easily manipulated, and do not necessarily correlate to the numbers that really matter. More actionable metrics are argued to be active users, engagement, the cost of getting new customers, and ultimately revenues and profits

Talking about Twitter specifically, Adi Avnit de-emphasizes the importance of followers due to the fact some users follow back others simply because of etiquette. His ‘million follower fallacy’ entails that this etiquette is leveraged by some users to elevate their follower count. The theory is not without evidence. Cha et al. (2010) measured user influence in Twitter and found that retweets and mentions showed great overlap, while followers gained… not so much. However, Kwak et al. (2010) in contrast found followers and page rank to be similar, while ranking by retweets differed.

investigated to what extent consumers engaged on brand tweets based on 4 dimensions:  amplification (retweets), reach (followers), conversations (mentions) and attitude (sentiment).

Popular measures are the 3F’s (friends, fans & followers).

following a great amount of people primarily affects a brand’s follower count. It doesn’t correlate with the other, more actionable, metrics. In fact, those brands perform worse on the other measures. Ergo, brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics

All interactions, whether it be likes, shares or wallposts, increase the EdgeRank which in turn exposes more fans to your content.

As the number of fans grew, so did the number of engaged fans (the interactions per mille stayed about the same). These two elements act as a positive spiral constantly growing the other.

I pose that the amount of fans, followers or friends is a relevant metric, considering it as the potential interaction userbase. Taking in consideration that your goal is to increase the number of engaged users.

Reach, amplification, conversations and sentiment appear to measure the same kind of digital influence. Brands that over-focus on increasing their follower count, perform worse based on the other metrics. Increase your user base – as your fans grow, so will the number of engaged fans

Chou calls the number of followers a “vanity metric” that doesn’t say much about how effective a social campaign is. Marketers can, after all, pay for followers. For now, the best way to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is to figure out which messages posted to Facebook, Twitter and other sites result in the highest levels of interaction.

A message that does not work is more dangerous than a message that doesn’t spur action: It can cause followers to lose interest. “Content turns into spam at some point,” Chou said. “At some point, if I'm posting a ton of crap to any network, someone might choose to unfollow me.”

Chou outlined four ways social media managers could measure the effectiveness of their posts: Virality: Good content gets shared. A viral video is cheap to make and can bring your message to new eyeballs. “Other mediums don’t have that,” Chou said.

Engagement: The 80/20 rule applies to social media, Chou said: 20% of the people generate 80% of the sharable content. “The more granular you can get... the better understanding you have of what's going on,”

Advocacy: Social media lets brands get endorsements from everyday people, so brands should pay attention to posts that get retweeted. “If my friend posts something, it means more to me than if some random brand posts something,” he said. Retention: Every message needs to be measured for its retention value. Every new follower is an additional member of the audience for your next message. 

A whopping 804 KB per page is comprised of images. Three years ago, images comprised just 372 KB of a page’s total payload.

images are one of the single greatest impediments to front-end performance. All too often, they’re either in the wrong format or they’re uncompressed or they’re not optimized to load progressively — or all of the above.

Today, 38% of pages use Flash, compared to 52% in 2010. This is a good thing. Nothing against Flash, per se, but if Apple has no plans ever to support it, its obsolescence is inevitable in our increasingly mobile-first world.

use of custom fonts has exploded — from 1% in 2010 to 33% today.

But custom fonts have a dark side: they can incur a significant performance penalty.

These days, images on the web have to work hard. They need to be high-res enough to satisfy users with retina displays, and they also need to be small enough in size that they don’t blow your mobile data cap in one fell swoop. Responsive web design attempts to navigate this tricky terrain, with varying degrees of success.

Google published findings, based on Google Analytics data, which suggest that load times have gotten marginally faster for desktop users, and up to 30% faster for mobile users.

Here at Strangeloop/Radware, we’ve found the opposite. Using WebPagetest, we’ve been testing the same 2,000 top Alexa-ranked ecommerce sites since 2010, and our data tells us that top ecommerce pages have gotten 22% slower in the past year.

This quick-and-dirty case study illustrates how network speed doesn’t directly correlate to load time. For example, download bandwidth increases 333% from DSL (1.5Mbps) to cable (5Mbps), yet the performance gain is only 12%.

Move scripts to the bottom of the page

It’s better to move scripts from the top to as low in the page as possible. One reason is to enable progressive rendering, but another is to achieve greater download parallelization.

Make JavaScript and CSS external

If users on your site have multiple page views per session and many of your pages re-use the same scripts and stylesheets, you could potentially benefit from cached external files. Pages that have few (perhaps only one) page view per session may find that inlining JavaScript and CSS results in faster end-user response times.

Reduce DNS lookups

Minify JavaScript

In addition to minifying external scripts, you can also minify inlined script blocks. Even if you’re already gzipping your scripts, minifying them will still reduce the size by at least 5%.