I have a love-hate relationship with planning and strategy when it comes to social media. I hate the planning aspect, but I also understand it is necessary to see the best results. And I love it when I see those results!
If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know that as often as I can, I like to show you examples of how I am putting the lessons that I am trying to share with you, into action. Yesterday’s post on social media engagement was a great example of this.
In the post, I talked about the importance of planning out the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts. Too often, we fail to plan our engagement efforts, then are disappointed with our results. Yesterday’s post was created to drive two specific types of engagement:
1 – New signups of my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter
2 – Social sharing to help the post rank higher in search engine results for the term “social media engagement”.
Additionally, the content itself was carefully created and crafted to help facilitate those types of engagement. For example, a very clear Call to Action was placed at the end asking readers to please sign up for my newsletter, and to share the post.
So 24 hours later, what have the results been? Let’s look at three areas:
1 – Newsletter signups. This was honestly the top goal for yesterday’s post. Previously, I had been averaging 3-4 new signups each day for my newsletter. Over the last 24 hours I have received 21 new signups. A pretty good jump.
2 – Social sharing. I wanted to see a lot of sharing of the post, especially on Twitter and Facebook. As you can see from the numbers at the end of each post, yesterday’s post was the most shared in weeks, with currently 82 retweets on Twitter and 70 Likes on Facebook. Additionally, yesterday was the 5th best day for traffic so far in 2013.
3 – Search engine results. I wanted yesterday’s post to rank as high as possible for the exact term “social media engagement”. When the post was first indexed by Google yesterday at around 10:00 am, it was on the 26th page of the results for the term “social media engagement”. By 5:00 pm it had moved up to page 10, and at 8:00 pm it was on page 9. At 6:30 am this morning it was all the way up to page 3, and a few minutes ago at 9:30 am it was on page 2 for “social media engagement”. Pretty darned good, and if I keep writing more posts with that term (as I did in this post) it will probably help push that post up further.
Pretty good results, right? My point in writing this post is to impress upon you the importance of planning out your social media efforts. Look at these results and think how quickly your blog could grow if you wrote just one post a week that was this successful? I am definitely thinking more along these lines!
So before you write that next post for your business blog, ask yourself these questions:
1 – What am I trying to accomplish with this post?
2 – What type of engagement am I trying to get?
3 – How can this post drive that type of engagement?
Start doing this before you write every post, and see if you don’t start seeing much better results from your blog. Oh and if you still aren’t seeing the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts, email me and I’ll be happy to discuss how I can help you!
Mack,
Thank you for the follow-up. One of the things that I appreciate most about you and your posts is not only that you give us actionable steps to improve our content or engagement efforts, but that you take the time to follow up and show us results.
It is not only motivating but also serves as great “case in points” for team members and colleagues. Thanks for all you do and, of course, congrats for hitting and exceeding your expectations!
– Kelly
Thank you Kelly! I think it helps others understand the lessons when they see the real-world results. Plus I also use these posts as a reminder to myself as to what success looks like so I keep putting more planning and structure around my own efforts.
Have a great weekend!