Sunday 25 April 2010

Using Twitter and LinkedIn To Drive Traffic To Your Site - 10 Day Experiment


THE BRIEF:
Conduct a 10 day social media push and measure effectiveness

At ARE Creative we have always had good SEO and frequent daily visitors to our web and blog. Google Analytics and our sitemeter confirmed they stayed for an average of 3-6 minutes and visited a variety of pages before leaving. We have never actively pushed sales from our blog, preferring to comment on our portfolio and write articles on aspects of Graphic Design, Branding, Blogging or Printing and provide an informative varied site that followers would enjoy coming back to.

THE METHOD:
Set aside 2 hours from each of 10 consecutive working days purely for Social Media Development.

We targeted Twitter and LinkedIn as the tools for our experiment. Picking 60 articles/portfolio to be published on the blog over 10 days, we set up automatic RSS feed posting to both sites from our blog. Increasing our profile and activity on both Twitter and LinkedIn required a considerable investment in time and some very necessary time management to ensure our workload still got finished. We did not change any element of the blog other than the colouring.

THE RESULT:
According to Google Analytics and our sitemeter, inbound traffic to our blog increased by 41% in the first 7 days and continued to rise.. We have had direct enquiries for Graphic Design and Marketing work, 3 contacts who we are meeting to discuss working together and 2 adverts to design.

IN SUMMARY:
2 hours per day requires commitment and does eat into a working day considerably. What would have happened if we had directed our traffic to a special offer or subscribe to our mailing list widget? 

Maybe this should be the next Social Media Push @ ARE Creative.

3 comments:

Amanda Sullivan said...

Phew that sounds like a major time investment...glad it paid off....really like what you are doing on your blog

Amanda Sullivan

James George said...

I agree with everything that you have said. I used both and LinkedIn alone has given me access to thousands of readers. I absolutely love their site, with the ability to submit my articles and people read them on a daily basis. LinkedIn even emails them when a new article is posted. These are valuable sources to increase traffic and give you a definite traffic flow increase.

Rachel said...

Just checked the google analytic stats for today and experiment conclusion is:


4,665
Page Views

14.01
Pages/Visit

6.01%
Bounce Rate

00:14:21
Avg. Time on Site

42.04%
% New Visits

298% increase in traffic

Woo Hoo,
Rachel