An increasing number of marketing managers are slowly buying into the benefit of social media marketing. The one question they all ask is, can you tell me some social media marketing success stories. Rather than focus on the big brand successes, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the success that two small businesses are having with social media marketing. My thanks to The Arizona Republic for doing this research.
Last year, Scottsdale-based ice- cream chain Cold Stone Creamery used the popular video-sharing site YouTube to disseminate a video it created to promote a new flavor. In the video, two ice cream flavors fell in love and got married. The ice-cream couple even had their own MySpace profile. Read more... (395 words, 1 image, estimated 1:35 mins reading time)
It might be summer, but there is no rest in the social media world. This week in our social media interview series we interviewed Sujan Patel of Docshop to talk about some of the social media tactics that he is using.
Sujan spoke about the importance of testing a social media campaign before you launch it: Read more... (374 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)
Great article by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net titled “Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic Than Digg. In the article Daren looks at the referring traffic for one of his blog posts titled “11 Surefire Tips for Improving Your Landscape Photography” and what he found was really interesting.
Traffic Data From Week 1
- Digg – 24,410 page views (43% of all traffic to the post for this period)
- Direct Traffic – 8634 page views
- StumbleUpon – 5599 page views (9.5% of traffic to the post)
- Wykop (A Digg clone)- 4661 page views
- Delicious – 2523 page views
Read more... (230 words, 1 image, estimated 55 secs reading time)
Interesting social media traffic experiment by Marketing Experiments called Harnessing Social Media – Web 2.0 Grows Up – Free Internet Traffic. What premise of the year-long experiment was whether social media sites could a substantial amount of “free” traffic to four web sites over the 12 months. They then compared this traffic with the cost of buying traffic via Google AdWords to see which one had the best ROI.
To handle the social media tactics Marketing Experiments hired someone at $10 an hour. Throughout the year this person spent 360 hours working on the project posting 255 blog excerpts and attempting “to engage in real and meaningful conversation with the community”. Read more... (401 words, 2 images, estimated 1:36 mins reading time)
Over the last two weeks we have conducted two different experiments to measure what social media sites sent traffic. In creating the test environment we deliberately picked two blogs that were unknown with no existing backlinks to them. We also did not attempt to “game” or promote these blog post on any of the social media sites that we contacted.
Our first experiment was with a blog post called The Story of Tea. We submitted the post to 20 social media sites and watched the page become the 3rd most viewed page on the site with 826 page views! The second post was called “Shopping For Tents” and we submitted the post of about 30 social media sites. That post has had 303 page views. Read more... (642 words, 1 image, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)
Thursday marked day four of this weeks social media traffic experiment. Not surprisingly traffic has slowed down, but with over 300 page views this week, the post continues to receive traffic and readers.
On Thursday afternoon I submitted the post to Fark.com and I was happy to see 8 referrals to the site yesterday. The social media sites sending traffic to the blog are:
- Stumbleupon.com – 117 Visits
- Reddit.com – 28 Visits
- Fark – 8 visits
- Digg.com – 4 Visits
- Google Referral – 3 Visit (this is for Google bookmarks)
- Indianpad.com – 2 Visits
Read more... (199 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)
Wednesday marked day three of this weeks social media traffic experiment. Not surprisingly traffic has slowed down, but interestingly the post continues it see double digit page views on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Yahoo is showing only one link to the page, but now that backlink is from Redditm while yesterday it was from Del.icio.us.
Overall the blog post has been viewed 284 times this week. The social media sites sending traffic to the post are:
- Stumbleupon.com – 117 Visits
- Reddit.com – 27 Visits
- Digg.com – 4 Visits
- Indianpad.com – 2 Visits
Read more... (113 words, 2 images, estimated 27 secs reading time)
It is quite apparent after only two tests that links from social media sites can have a very positive impact on your search engine rankings, especially with Google.
As Adam Snider of Law Depot commented yesterday:
Ranking high in search results is one of the huge payoffs I’ve noticed while submitting to social bookmarking sites. Even if a particular site doesn’t bring a lot of direct traffic, these sites tend to get indexed often and rank high in Google’s SERPs. Even if no one from Digg actually visits your site, just having the link on Digg will boost your search results, which is a benefit that certainly can’t be ignored.
Read more... (329 words, 1 image, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
Tuesday marked day two of this weeks social media traffic experiment and the big news was the surprising SEO results of the page.
The first surprise was that Yahoo has already spidered the site and is showing a backlink from Del.icio.us. The second surprise was a Google search for the blog post title “Shopping For Tents” shows two results on the home page for the post. One leads to Digg and the second leads to Reddit. So in less than a week we were able to get our blog post onto the first page of Google for a phrase with over 1.8 million competing pages purely on the strength of links from social media sites.
Overall the blog post has been viewed 268 times this week. The social media sites sending traffic to the blog are: Read more... (164 words, 1 image, estimated 39 secs reading time)
Monday kicked off a new week and another social media experiment. This week we are using an article called Shopping for Tents to measure what social media sites sent traffic to the blog post.
We posted the blog article late Friday and then spent most of today submitting the article to the 30+ social media sites listed below. Even using Social Poster this process still took a couple of hours to complete. The up-side is that we now have the username Social Media on almost every social media blog:) Read more... (213 words, 1 image, estimated 51 secs reading time)