Something that people are talking a lot about right now in the last year is Social Media. What it is and how to use it. However, very few talk about what it can actually give a company in numbers. In the end, it is the increase in revenue that is interesting and what motivates a company to choose to work with Social Media as a marketing strategy, but so far no one has really presented any interesting data. Until now.
Two studies that show this are The Social Habit 2011, which talks about people’s relationship with the Internet and Social Media and Lead Generation Lessens From 4,000 Businesses(PDF) which talks about how Blogging and Social Media (Facebook/Twitter) affect the number of leads.
SocialMedia Examiner has summarised these two studies very well and the reading is very interesting. There seems to be “magic numbers” for how often you should publish material in your company blog and how many followers you should have on Facebook / Twitter.
What is the best update frequency?
Below I summarise the data from the studies and derive from the charts the optimal time intervals for how often you should post material. “Optimal” in this case is when you get the highest possible results for the time invested.
I really encourage a thorough reading of SocialMedia Examiner’s article, as it has much more data on the subject.
Company blog
- Minimum posting frequency: 1 time per week
- Optimal posting frequency: Daily
- Minimum number of posts for traffic generation: 20-50
- Optimal number of posts for traffic generation: Over 200
- Optimal follower size (People who clicked “like”): 1000 or more
The interesting thing about Facebook is that before you have at least 700-1000 followers, you show very low results. It is only when you get over this result that you actually see that something happens.
- Optimal follower size: 1000 or more
The difference between Twitter and Facebook is radical in terms of results. On Twitter, you can get leads from square one, and then these increase at a fairly steady rate – unlike Facebook where virtually nothing happens and then – bam – everything falls in at once.
The company blog – The hub of a company’s social media strategy
For a company that wants to have an active role on the web, its blog content is its core business. It is very unfortunate that many companies have not realised the importance of their website and editorial content, and instead choose to focus solely on channels like Facebook or Twitter.
Mashable wrote a very interesting article a while ago where they help to divide different marketing efforts into categories. There are Paid channels, Owned channels, and then channels that you “Earn”. Different media types have different numbers of elements of these channel types, and this is what makes businesses need a mix of solutions to achieve the best results.
The company blog generates business over time
A corporate blog becomes very much an “Owned channel” rather than a channel you pay for (Content costs to produce – and the website itself costs to develop) and one you earn (content from the website is shared via e.g. Facebook & Twitter).
This channel you have total control over, and it stays over time and generates leads and traffic (Above, the case study told us that most traffic is generated if you have over 200 posts in your company blog). The advantage of an owned channel is that it markets itself via Google, for example. If you write 200 interesting articles, you have 200 times more chance of being found when someone searches for that type of information. The Angry Creative blog, for example, has generated some business as we blog about “expert topics” that are quite narrow and that we have a lot of knowledge about. We are happy to share this knowledge, and then when someone searches for this information and finds us, it often results in an assignment.
Microbloggers = Readers on your blog (Facebook / Twitter)
Facebook & Twitter are primarily used to generate traffic to the company blog when you have fresh information to share, and to act as customer service. Here the focus is on quick publications and extremely continuous ones. Posting something on Facebook & Twitter is usually not visible for more than a few hours or minutes, and therefore posting here has become something of a science in when to post and how. However, this is something that you have to figure out what works best for you – but a couple of times a day is a must.
It is this “occasional nature” that makes Facebook & Twitter not good to use as solutions when building your Social Media presence. The content produced on Facebook & Twitter has an extremely short life, while the content on the blog has an extremely long one that generates in the long run.