search marketing blog: ambergreen

How much does the traffic from social networks cost? Setting up a blog is a long term commitment and often requires deep engagement in the community, i.e. not only adding content but also responding on existing content and answering questions. This is usually the barrier that stop most companies investing in social media optimisation. The large number of different communities with different demographics does not make this investment cheaper. Whatever the barriers are new corporate blogs are created and they often live until the initial enthusiasm wears off. So is it possible to increase traffic to your blog from social networking websites? How to maintain the traffic and enthusiasm as well?

We’ve decided to perform an experiment in order to measure the potential of traffic from social networking websites.

SMO campaign Step by Step guide

In our research, we’ve taken the following steps.

Step 1: On 14th June 2007 we’ve created a Blogger account and the Uncontrolled experiments blog was born. We’ve also set up a Google Analytics account to measure the effects of our social networking campaign.

Step 2: The same day we’ve added a blog post “The Four Best Ways To Sleep At Work“

Step 3: We’ve submitted the blog post to the following social networking/bookmarking websites.

• Digg.com
• Netscape.com
• Reddit.com
• Del.icio.us
• Stumbleupon.com
• Google.com/Bookmarks
• Myweb2.search.yahoo.com
• Technorati.com
• Indianpad.com
• Socialogs.com
• Furl.net
• Diigo.com
• Wirefan.com
• Bibsonomy.org
• Looklater.com
• Blinklist.com
• Blogmemes.net
• Bluedot.us
• Myjeeves.ask.com
• Backflip.com
• Netvouz.com
• Folkd.com
• Blinkbits.com
• Bmaccess.net
• Shadows.com
• Ma.gnolia.com
• Plugim.com
• scoreguru.com
• Bestofindya.com
• Linkagogo.com
• Dotnetkicks.com
• Mister-wong.de

Step 4: Added a question on Yahoo! Answers with a link to the blog post

Measuring the SMO campaign effects

Day 3: Although it wasn’t the aim of our experiment on the Day 3 we’ve noticed that the page has been indexed by Google are ranks for a targeted search query.

Day 4 & Day 5: 73 visitors, most referrers from Yahoo! answers, however, the traffic still hasn’t peaked.

Day 6: On the 6th day of the experiment we’ve noticed a considerable increase in traffic, in total 15,370 users visited the page. We’ve also found that pages related to our content now take most of the space in SERPs when searching Google for “ways to sleep at work”.

Day 7: On day 7 an avalanche of traffic and traffic sources has started. We’ve noted an increase in visits from domains such as mail.google.com, webmail.aol.com and mail.yahoo.com, which suggests that the story has not only travelled across social networking websites but also email accounts. The total number of visitors on Day 7 was 20,386.

SMO campaign summary

Conclusion

1. We’ve proved that traffic from an SMO campaign doesn’t have to be expensive

2. It’s unpredictable and we can’t forecast traffic volumes

3. Requires unique, creative content and a catchy heading

4. Only effective if it targets the right audience. We’ve noted very different traffic volumes from different social networking sites, which suggest that the content and message has to be specific to a particular community.

Posted in Social Media |