Social media

This is really a starting point for people that are just entering into the world of social media.  All social media experts may want to stop reading now.  Unless of course you’re interested in how we engaged in social media and how it seems to be working.

We currently use LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  When I joined PlannedSites (Marketing Manager – Paddy), these were websites that I was familiar with and had already utilised to good effect in my last role.  We may exploit more avenues in the future, but building up a profile on these sites is proving to be time consuming enough!

LinkedIn

I already had a large network on LinkedIn, and to some degree this helped.  However I began joining groups relevant to the web industry, and found it quite a different prospect.  My last role was marketing for a recruitment firm, and I was trying to attract individuals to sign up to a database.   However, now, I am driving people directly to the website.  As we write a lot of articles, LinkedIn gave us an immediate avenue to be able to post them, and so we began attracting people to our site.  These articles have given PlannedSites a really good traffic boost.  They have also attracted people that have issues with their websites to make enquiries with us.

Twitter

I don’t know if we have fully exploited Twitter yet.  I do know that we have got a lot of traffic from it, arguably the most out of the three.

I began by ‘tweeting’ things that I found interesting, but nobody else did!  Such as, “A lot of work is going into our CRM system at the moment. This is going to be a really good product.”  The result – Zero traffic to the website.

Now I simply post links to our new articles, and the traffic really started coming through.  It’s quick and easy and demands the least management time out of the three.  I do feel that there is more that can be done with Twitter (and welcome suggestions!).

Facebook

I have a personal Facebook page, but didn’t want to cross it with work.  I set up a group page for PlannedSites and invited a few friends/clients to join it, but it was largely a redundant page.

Then Gideon Voy (SEO expert and colleague) started a Facebook page, and has since taken over the whole management of building it up.  It’s starting to do really well as he has the opportunity to use his page from a purely commercial perspective.   He follows 4 simple steps:

1.    Search for industry related groups
2.    Join the group
3.    Add people as friends from the group
4.    Once they are friends invite them to join the PlannedSites group

It’s important at stage 3 to tell people that you want to add them as a friend to discuss web related issues.  Then if they accept, there is a really good chance that they will also join your group.

The strategy has made the group page become quite popular and people are beginning to interact and post their own comments on our wall.  The traffic is slowly beginning to build as well.

We have found that Social media is important for 3 reasons:

1.    Guidance - You meet like minded people who are willing to read your articles and give constructive feedback
2.    You drive traffic to your site
3.    You create business opportunities

You are involved in a community which essentially trades information.  Not only are you given guidance on your opinions, but others will offer an opposing view on a subject, or write something that you hadn’t even considered - which can be very productive.

Does it drive more traffic to your site?

Yes – dramatically.  Although we have been putting a big marketing effort in recently website visits for www.plannedsites.com are increasing and around 50% of that is attributed to social media work.  The following figures demonstrate how much social media has increased traffic to our site.

June – July visits increased by 7.95%  
July – August visits increased by 7.95%
August – September visits increased by 13.1% (With a week left in September!)