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I started out my morning today reading this article: To Be Blunt, a Lot of Your Social-Media Marketing is Getting You Nowhere. It includes this key line: “Let’s say, for sake of example, you are a bank. Does it really make sense for you to keep on pinning?”
I have a pretty good anecdotal idea of how Offbeat Bride’s social media channels perform, but this article prompted me to do a quick audit to see if I could confirm my suspicions that despite 18k followers, Twitter doesn’t really do much for us. Pulling the numbers not only confirmed that, but blew my mind:
Despite the fact that we share all the same links and content on Twitter as we do via Facebook, Twitter delivers less than 1% of Offbeat Bride’s social media traffic. LESS THAN 1%! I’m on Twitter all day every day, and the only engagement I tend to see with the @offbeatbride account is vendors rebroadcasting our content to their followers (usually via bots), or sometimes sharing links to our site when we publish a wedding they worked on.
Does this mean I’m going to kill @offbeatbride on Twitter? No. Or rather, not yet. The account doesn’t take much effort, but it’s useful for me to consider at what point it’s worth killing a non-performing social media property. When does it make sense to just take a social media account out back and put it out of its misery, rather than have it quietly continue to perform poorly?
I see this exact same thing. Ultimately, I decided to leave Twitter because of the value of a brand presence. It’s just … weird not to be on it, even if it doesn’t drive traffic. But I spend a lot, lot, LOT less energy on it.
I don’t use twitter often, but I got the most use out of it during conventions and workshop type events. It was an easy way to keep up to date on what is going on for a particular event.
I suppose you could do that with facebook, but it is easier to filter based on tags with twitter.
Great point about the real-time event updates… increasingly with wedding events, I’m seeing folks default to Instagram instead of Twitter. This may be a wedding industry vs tech industry difference?
Possibly. There is much less of a visual element to the software conventions I’ve been to.
I too have noticed that twitter doesn’t really get me any traffic. When people share my website, it’s usually through facebook or pinterest. But I’ve actually managed to network a bit with other stationers and professionals through twitter. I haven’t been spending much time on twitter after realizing that it’s not the best use of time, but I’ll definitely keep it open.
I agree, it doesn’t drive traffic for me but it’s been useful for networking! Why not just automate it via IFTTT instead of deleting the account?
I think so long as it remains free and it’s something you enjoy, it’s not harming anything if it’s not taking away from you revenue generating part of your engagement strategy.
It’s no cost, so I’m not seeing a downside until it becomes burdensome and distracting to the things that you do need to drive traffic and therefor revenue.
Interesting. For me twitter is 99% a networking and sanity-making tool, as a work at home person. Though the networking has gotten me some jobs, but that over a process for months/years.
When I share offbeat bride/etc to twitter, I’m not usually seeing it same day, so it is pretty rare for me to be retweeting you rather than constructing my own.
I use twitter as mainly a news feed and lolcats reader. I retweet, but mainly it’s original content (not links). I notice OBH posts are mostly just the titles of articles with a link. I’m a regular reader, so usually I’ve already seen the article that’s linked on twitter. I would like to see more content that I can’t already get from visiting the website.
Thanks for this feedback! I manage the twitter account — what kind of content would you be interested in seeing?
I don’t have a twitter, but on facebook I love seeing older links shared. I already get email alerts when a new post goes up, so for me, seeing the link on social media is redundant. However, even though I read quite a few pages worth of posts when I first discovered you guys, theres a lot I haven’t read! I love the links to older posts that I likely would have never seen otherwise.
Total newbie question: How do you get those traffic stats? Is that a tool built into your website or is it some kind of service you use? I would like to be able to figure this out for my website!
Google Analytics is where I got these stats, and it’s the industry standard — but honestly, it’s overkill for most bloggers: http://analytics.google.com
If you blog using a self-hosted WordPress install, Jetpack’s stats module is enough info for most folks: http://jetpack.me
Thank you!!
For me, Twitter has always been about networking rather than reaching readers. I participate in blogger hashtag chats, communicate with brands, follow along with conferences, tweet about Disney breaking news, etc. I have built IRL friendships with vendors and other bloggers that started with months of Twitter small talk. Yes I share my links a few times a day too, but Twitter traffic is never in my Top 5. I share just to stay “in the game.” The real question is, why do I bother continuing to post on Google+?
I’ve heard rumors from publishers who’ve spoken to Google managers that having a G+ link on your page helps with your SEO. I don’t know if I believe it or not.