How multiple social media accounts affected our online reach for startup business
A case study done for Camp House Concerts by Cody Box.
Situation
Wanted to reach as many website visitors as possible while not knowing where our target market spent their time online.
Initial Research
Most marketing experts and social media blogs will tell you that it is better to master few rather than be mediocre at all of them. However, we were able to utilize certain tools to help us manage all of our social accounts.
Efforts
We took to the major players in the game, Facebook, Twitter & Instagram first and established a social media “homebase” if you’ll call it that. We knew from general knowledge that this would be how we reached the meat of our target audience.
After establishing our homebase, we looked at broadening our reach to multiple social media networks. Networks include: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, Blogger, YouTube, Vimeo, Spotify, Soundcloud, Stumbleupon and Reddit.
By having a brand guideline in place, we were able to deliver a consistent message across all networks. Efforts and types of content shared to these are explained:
Written: Blog Posts, Press Releases and other written content is published to our website blog or RSS feed and Tumblr, Blogger, Google+ and Twitter accounts. We individually selected links to be posted on Stumbleupon and Reddit.
Photos: We upload all of our photos to Flickr and only about 30% or our “best”are uploaded to Google+ and our website. We take a different approach to Instagram.
Videos: Videos of our concerts, interviews and events are uploaded both to YouTube and Vimeo simultaneously. A link is also shared on Twitter when we uploaded a new video.
Music: We like to share music from artists that have previously performed at the concert venue to our fans. This allows them to keep up with artists that they’ve heard as well as puts the artist in front of the audience. We created playlists that are publicly available for others to follow on both Spotify and Soundcloud.
Tools Utilized
We used the service IFTTT (If This Then That) to make the sharing of content seamless. For example, when we post a new blog article, the app automatically publishes it to Tumblr, Blogger, Google+ and Twitter accounts. We have just taken out four time consuming steps by utilizing this free service. Another great example is anytime we post a status update on Facebook, our Twitter, Tumblr and Google+ accounts are updated. We also use Hootsuite to keep up with social mentions and messages.
Statistics
All data presented below was calculated YTD on October 4, 2018.
Facebook, Twitter & Instagram
Not surprising, Facebook accounted for 18% of all website visitors and 92% of all social media traffic. Twitter generated 2.1% of of all social media traffic while being responsible for .41% of all website visitors. Instagram’s website visitors was <1% and had only .15% of social traffic.
Stumbleupon & Reddit
Stumbleupon brought 3.76% of all social media traffic while Reddit was responsible for .77%.
Google+, Tumblr & Others
Google+ had 1.05% share of the social media traffic while Tumblr accounted for .02% of all social media traffic. Visitors coming in from Flickr, YouTube and Vimeo were 0.
<1% of total website visitors: Instagram, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo
Key Takeaways
We had a good assumption that Facebook was going to lead the charge as it did. We were impressed with the outcome of Twitter visitors as we only autopost on that channel. The biggest surprise was the website traffic generated by StumbleUpon. This was a new area where we tested the waters and it tested well. Unfortunately, on June 30, 2018, StumbleUpon shut down.
We will move to increase our efforts on Reddit with respect to the StumbleUpon news. We had posted 66% less on Reddit compared to StumbleUpon and still received impressive results. Pinterest is also a similar platform which could yield similar results, but will require more time.
YouTube & Vimeo also accounted for 0 website visitors and we will admit that we lack content on those platforms. We believe once we roll out successful video campaigns, we can be effective on these platforms. According to Statistic, YouTube alone has nearly 2 billion users as of July 2018.
Flickr suprisingly accounted for 0 website visitors however, Flickr reports that we have 26.2K photo views. We were surprised because this is where we host all of our pictures and send all of our website users to. This could be due to the fact that unlike other platforms, Flickr does not showcase a users link or url. This could be a reason to change services.
We learned with Google+ and Tumblr, that our audience that follows us on Facebook or Twitter are either not on these platforms or they are not active. However, some better understanding of these two networks could provide essential website traffic as they account for over 1 billion active users as of July 2018 according to Statistic.
Spotify & Soundcloud has been our least effective social media channels. However, others within the country music industry do a great job at sharing their created playlists with their readers. For instance, texasmusicpickers.com has nearly 2K profile followers and nearly 6K followers on a single playlist. Keep in mind that these do not directly have an effect on their website traffic but does give them leverage as the go to source for what music is popular in the Texas Country Music industry. Spotify and Soundcloud can be used to reach a major audience and ultimately lead to a greater market share.
Looking Away From The Stats
Stats aside, by having these numerous profiles, when we search Google for “Camp House Concerts”, we dominate the search results. For example, when searching for “All”, the front page has links to our Facebook and Google+ profiles with YouTube and Instagram appearing within the first three pages. We talked earlier how Flickr and Vimeo were lacking in providing us website traffic when in fact, they could be providing a high volume of visitors. When you run the same Google search and click “Images”, Vimeo and Flickr dominate the front page with over 30% of images being provided from those two platforms. Twitter, Facebook and Google+ also provide excellent results on the front page.
Conclusions
If we would have listened to so-called experts in our initial research, we would have missed out on the vast number of new visitors from sites like Reddit & Stumbleupon. We will move our efforts away from StumbleUpon, following the shutdown, and focus them on Reddit.
We discovered different trends than expected and believe that with the use of tools like IFTTT, we are pushing more content out there on the internet than before. The multiple sites seem to be helping with Google SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. With the given data, we can now allot more time to the appropriate platforms in hopes of gaining more website traffic.
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Originally published on October 18, 2018.
