Yesterday was a big day in web traffic for the Hughes & Co. family. We posted our prices, we told you we posted our prices and you charged our website looking for the numbers.
We have a very robust analytics system so we know that our clients were on here, we know that our peers in the digital marketing industry were on here and we know that there were a lot of people we've never encountered before that were on here.
Most of this was social media traffic, but the engagement level was one comment on a LinkedIn post and one retweet on my personal Twitter account. So this begs the question, if you knew who was heading to your website, would you worry as much about who was commenting?
Engagement Numbers
Most of the time we are watching engagement numbers for our clients with eyes wide, anticipating a response. Why do we care about engagement? Because we want to build a community that will talk about what our clients have going on.
Engagement is caring enough to spend time (we really view time as currency) sharing you thoughts and ideas with a company. Based on the type of client we see various levels of engagement. The most popular to chat with clients are the ones who are offering items of reasonably average interest: restaurants, retail stores, car dealerships, and the like.
What is interesting is that our other clients with less "lets chat" inducing content get the same number of click-throughs and the same number of leads.
Yesterday by Numbers
So yesterday we posted our blog post about publishing our prices to a number of social mediums. We thought it would be interesting to show you the accounts, the number of click-throughs and the number of leads. Why? Well we get a lot of inquiries about what we do from people who are trying hard to make their social media work and people just aren't responding. This will ideally convince them to subscribe to an analytics tool to measure the return on their investment and then maybe try out a relationship or inbound tool. We have a few suggestions at the end of the blog.
@ALLIEHUES | Click-Throughs: 254 | Leads: 3 | Engagement: 1 retweet
@HUGHESNCO | Click-Throughs: 13 | Leads: 0 | Engagement: 0
Hughes & Co. Facebook Page | Click-Throughs: 47 | Leads: 2 | Engagement: 0
Personal LinkedIn Page | Click-Throughs: 17 | Leads: 1 | Engagement: 1 comment
Hughes & Co. LinkedIn Page | Click-Throughs: 7 | Leads: 0 | Engagement: 0
So our social media drove 338 clicks for one blog post alone yesterday. Our engagement was nearly non-existent. Our conversion rate from visitor to lead was 17% based on that blog post alone. Not a bad day.
Tools To Help You Measure
HUBSPOT - we are a certified HubSpot partner, so you could have guessed that this is number one. There is an investment associated with this tool and it starts at $200 per month. It pays for itself quickly and the cost does scale with your success. Our monthly fee felt large when we started but even despite the growth of the fee as our company has grown, it feels small. We are a dramatically more profitable business with this tool.
SproutSocial - This is a tool we used for a while for quick report generating, and it is excellent for exactly that use. It will tell you who is clicking through to your website, it will tell you how many people are checking things out and what the demographic information is. Lots of helpful stuff to demonstrate the value of what you're doing.
Swayy - This tool is super beautiful to use, has a lot of easy publishing options and does the full measure for you. Ideally, you need to know where your customers are coming from. We know at Hughes & Co. that our customers come from Twitter mostly, LinkedIn second and Facebook third. We also know that we need to share twice the content on Facebook that we do on LinkedIn, and with the content on Twitter that we do on Facebook. Knowing that kind of stuff is super powerful for your marketing strategies.
ManageFlitter - Another clean interface that gives you a lot of powerful features, ManageFlitter is known for robust analytics that will work hard for your business.
What we hope this has done for you is shown you that even if you are not receiving the wonderful words of your flock of followers, you are very likely still grabbing their attention. Getting engagement is often the hardest part of the battle, so invest the small dollars required to make the best of your social media strategy and start feeling the real impact of your hardwork. We have an e-book just below that will help you kick-start a strategy if you don't know where to begin.
