Useful Social Media - Corporate Social Media Best Practice

It appears that I am being overcome by my workload – profound apologies for my lack of post last week. If we can all say that it was planned all along as part of my Easter break, I would be much obliged.

I now have two weeks’ worth of stuff to cover, so to business.

First off, a point of information – on the 2nd April our ‘super early bird’ (saving $400 on any conference ticket) expired. So traffic will be up in absolute terms, and I would imagine ‘direct traffic’ numbers will increase as people log on simply to register their pass. Let’s see if that theory is borne out by the stats.

THE ACTIVITY

Social Media:

LinkedIn: Started group discussions on a variety of LinkedIn groups (with about 140,000 members all in) – content here. This was pretty salesy (title: “Save $400 on corporate social media conference with Adidas, Dell, Whole Foods, Sears, McDonald’s, General Mills, Intuit, Johnson & Johnson, Paramount and many more”)

Blogs: The first blog from one of my moderators and a partner on the conference – Rohit Bhargava. Rohit posted on his own (brilliant) blog – here – and on Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence blog (Rohit is SVP of Digital Strategy for Ogilvy). Both are widely read and well respected. It means a lot to me that Rohit has said that “This is not your usual social media event, and for any of our clients looking to learn real social media lessons from brand marketers who are actively doing it right now – this is one of the best events of the year.”

Facebook: 3 short posting, all of which were just regurgitations of Tweets about the conference.

Twitter: 14 tweets directly from me over the two weeks. 5 were in response to questions/comments, 4 linking to interesting articles, a couple of chatty ones (celebrating follower increase etc) and 5 were directly about the conference.

As well as this, my ‘Share This on Twitter’ mechanism on the website (here – look at the top right) has borne fruit, with 5 people kindly sharing info on the event using this tool (and getting info out to a network of 3,685 more people). Another 5 people mentioned us/the conference in Tweets, exposing us to another 2, 176 people.

Document Storage Sites: A total of 1,497 people have now viewed my documents online (this is 219 more than on the 31st March, and equates to 18.25 ‘free’ clicks per day.). The site that gets me the most readers is SlideShare (654), followed by Scribd (635). A long way behind is DocStoc (208).

Traditional:

1 x email to an external list of about 5,000 contacts – focusing on the free white paper on corporate social media that we have written

1 x advertisement in a social media newsletter with a readership of about 100,000 – pushing the conference itself

5 x emails to various groups on our internal database, totalling about 4,500 contacts – from reminders of discounts, to deadlines, to content-based messages on things like a recent near-riot at American Apparel

THE RESULTS

The Basics: 31 more Twitter followers, 15 more Facebook fans, 2 more LinkedIn group followers.

Advanced:

• 28.58% of traffic to my site was direct (9.19% DOWN on this time two weeks ago)
• 31.93% of traffic was from referring sites (which is 1.21% UP on two weeks ago, and seems to represent a consistent growth)
• 6.89% of traffic was from search engines (which is 4.46% DOWN on two weeks ago)
• 32.60% was from ‘other’ – which, according to this article, mean traffic from specially tagged links I have used – ie via trackable marketing listings, eshots, etc)

The top five sources of traffic to my site were:

1. Direct Traffic (28.58% – DOWN 9.19% on two weeks)
2. Google Ads (20.72% – UP 6.63% on two weeks ago)
3. Internal Marketing Emails (6.64% – DOWN 5.69% on two weeks ago)
4. Rohit Bhargava’s blog mentions (6.52% of all traffic
5. Organic Google Search (6.52% of all traffic)

Focusing on traffic that social media has pushed directly to my site, I get the following:

1. Rohit’s blog (6.52% of all traffic)
2. LinkedIn (3.29% of all traffic)
3. Facebook (0.84% of all traffic)
4. Twitter (0.3% of all traffic)

This Twitter figure is abnormally low, so I am assuming I have screwed up tracking at some point in the last couple of weeks.

However, counting it for now, this means that my social media activity accounted for 10.95% of all traffic to my site over the last two weeks.

I’m worried about this drop – I don’t feel like I’ve done noticeably less than previous weeks. However, if we remove the blog from Rohit, we’re down to 4.43% of all traffic. That’s a huge drop and I don’t see the explanation. Any info from you would be much appreciated.

Anyway, my next post will be a series of charts. They are there to give you a visual representation of the stats I’ve been tracking over the last few weeks. I’ll kick off with the following:

1. Various ‘basic’ social media KPIs (ie followers etc) tracked against estimated amount of time I spent on social media work. This also shows you the growth rate of my various social media accounts over time.
2. A Twitter-focused graph, showing increase in follower numbers against number of Tweets.
3. There’s a graph showing the % of traffic from social media over the course of my marketing so far, mapped against the amount of activity I’ve done.

Any requests for other graphs/metrics to track will be gratefully accepted – I’ll try my best to put them together.