Social Media: Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.
At BlogIndiana I heard an interesting statistic : Approximately 75% of the visitors to your blog or website are first time visitors. This didn’t sound right, surely people were coming back again and again. But I checked my own statistics and sure enough, 72% of my guests were first timers.
All that new content I was generating, was it going to waste? If I just wrote the same post over and over again, who would know? Well I believe it isn’t going to waste, because every post builds SEO bait. At the same time, the practice is improving my writing skills.
The fact that 3/4 of my audience is new every day presents an interesting challenge. If his is the first time you have arrived here, I want you to know a bit about us. – At Roundpeg, we are focused on small business. We write about marketing, social media, pr, web design, and business planning. Occasionally we show off samples of our work, and link to projects we do for our small business clients. Look around, we hope you will enjoy your stay, and maybe come back and become part of the other 25%
However, if you are part of my regular audience. I am glad you are back.. On this visit, I hope you will take the time to share some of your thoughts. What keeps you coming back?
BlogIndiana – Be There
One of the coolest events of the year, (atleast for local bloggers) is BlogIndiana. This two day event brings together experts and rookies sharing advice, ideas and strategies.
It is a great way to connect off line, with people you have met online ( And in many cases the conversations continue back on line, long after the event is over.)
I will be attending the first day of BlogIndiana again this year. There is a terrific line up of speakers, and it was tough to decide on who I would check out and who I would unfortunately have to skip.
Will you be there? It promises to be a great event.
The Power of Social Media
A few weeks ago, the Roundpeg crew attended the first Indy Social Media Happy Hour. It was a fantastic event put on by Will Hardison of Mediaplug, the Team from BlogIndiana and Scott Wise of Scotty’s Brewhouse. The event gave us the opportunity to witness the true power of social media in our everyday lives.
The Indy Social media Happy Hour did not send out e-mail invites, did not advertise on a single website, and did not make one phone call. The only way someone could find out about (and register for) the event was to hear about it on Twitter. Initially, only 100 tickets were released. No one was sure what kind of response to expect, given no advertising would occur and the events hosts would simply depend on the viral nature of Twitter’s word-of-mouth buzz.
The event sold out in 4 hours.
4 hours.
With absolutely no marketing budget, the IndySMHH sold out and filled the place in which it was held. To me, is the best example I’ve ever seen of the power of social media. The entire IndySMHH team did a fantastic job of harnessing the power of social media and channeled it into something fun and productive. I had the opportunity to meet so many wonder folks who I might never would have had a chance to otherwise.
The best part…they’re planning another one on April 19 . Just make sure to keep checking that Twitter feed…
Follow Indy Social Media Happy Hour on Twitter here.
Maybe Engagement is Not Required, But It Helps!
Last week I read a two well written blog posts by authors I admire on the subject of engagement.
Chris Brogan said: I shoot for being as personal as I can. I write as if I’m writing only to you. I ask you questions where I’m genuinely interested in your answer.
Darren Rose said: Three years ago if you’d asked me what strategies I’d been implementing on my blogs it probably would have been more about optimizing advertising and affiliate promotions. While I still do work on these things I guess I’ve realized that making money from a blog tends to look after itself a little more when you have an engaged and growing readership.
After reading both these posts in the same day i was inspired! I was going to talk about engagment to readers. Then I sat through Jason Falls’ presentation at BlogIndiana in which he declared that many great blogs break “established rules” He gave some wonderful examples of bloggers like Seth Godin who don’t allow comments on their blogs.
Then I was left in a quandary, for the average small business owner who has a blog, does engagement matter. Is it bad if no one comments? From my perspective I am interested in interacting with my visitors/ I always reply to people, and thank them for comments, even if the disagree with me because it lets me know they are listening. But my traffic numbers and RSS subscriptions tell people are coming, even if I haven’t motivated them to comment.
So my advice to my clients is going to be, WRITE! It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone responds. Watch your analytics to tell you if you are reaching people, and give them the option to comment if they chose too. Then follow the suggestions Darren and Chris’ lay out to increase engagment. And if you really don’t want to, remember there are no rules, if your approach works, keep doing it.
