Last week Twitter opened up their analytics to the general public. The site basically allows you to see how many times you were mentioned, retweeted, if you were followed and unfollowed and the most interesting one, how many times a link you tweeted was clicked. I must admit I am not someone who is extremely active on social networks (although I have a twitter and facebook account for the blog), but looking at the statistics for the clicks I was surprised how little they were used. I used to have social sharing buttons on my blog, but when I found out nobody seemed to be using them I removed them. Now I don’t think I will stop posting to either Twitter or Facebook yet but it did make me wonder about their effectiveness. This week’s question:
Do you use social media for your blog and do you notice the benefit of them?
That’s getting into SEO territory. I’ve done some social media but I’m not as knowledgeable as say a social media manager. All I do know is that keywords and hashtags and all that make or break your usage effectivity. For it to be effective, you’d have to do all that analytics stuff that I’m very poor at.
Or get someone to do it for you and optimize your posts. I can’t do it too well in my own writing because it sounds forced. But they do pay people to do it.
I just say “screw it” and keep writing, tweeting it and posting on FB. I find more people read when certain topics pop up, like fashion.
I always try to stay away from SEO as it isn’t the reason I blog, but I do like the interaction with others. It seems that Twitter is not the most efficient way to do it…
I do, but not as a primary method of promotion.
When my posts go live they are automatically released on my twitter feed, and though it should do so for Facebook I have to manually “share” the posts.
I do not do much with twitter so I get almost no traffic from the tweet about my post going live. When I share the post on Facebook I usually share it first on my VictorsMovieReviews page, and then share that on my personal Facebook page. I do get traffic and comments from those notifications.
Although I am on Facebook I hardly use it…not a big fan of the platform to be honest..
I use Twitter the most, Reddit the second most and Facebook last. Reddit is a good way to get people to your site, not sure if they ever come back though.
I should be looking into Reddit more, although I have looked at it in the past I never could get the hang of it in regards to posting your own posts…
Interesting, but I guess not everyone can access that data yet. When I visit that link it asks me to sign up and pay for promoting my account. There’s no available stats to look at.
As far as social media in general, I do get the odd visit from twitter and fb, and every so often I get a bunch of hits from reddit. But overall it’s nothing substantial. Perhaps it would be more useful if my content had more mass appeal.
Surprising, did not know that not everyone could see those.
Movie reviews are a niche indeed and it’s mostly fellow movie bloggers who like to read things 🙂
I use Twitter and Facebook, but not often enough to see serious results. I have been trying to update them more lately though, so we’ll see if I get any noticeable traffic boosts.
Interesting to hear the results 🙂
I use social media a lot. It’s more about creating a community than advertising, I think. In my opinion, the more value I give to another through social media outlets, the more likely they are to reciprocate. As far as driving traffic to my blog… that would require POSTING more often. Even still, keeping your face known in the micro-blogosphere will generate more attention to YOUR content WHEN you post it. “Pay it Forward.”
Yeah, community is much more important to me as well. Of course it is important to visit other blogs to build the community…agree with that. Thanks Summer.
In my day job, I’ve done a lot of SEO and SMO work, and maintaining an effective Twitter and Facebook following is definitely critical, but a challenge for any organization, let alone an individual. That’s handy that Twitter is finally providing analytics, but there are a number of even more in-depth tools to track engagement that are very useful (Klout, for one), and some people are obsessive about building their numbers. Often however, it’s quite impossible for an individual blogger to really utilize Twitter and Facebook to its full extent. Often my click-through rates are very low, and I can’t seem to get anyone to like my Facebook page (please do!), so my approach has been that I don’t have a separate Twitter account for the blog and more specifically link it to my personal account. People follow me because I’m a person and have thoughts and individuality on Twitter and not solely links. They like what I share externally and it occasionally drives them to my site. I wish I had the capacity to do more with both mediums, but it’s often been a place where I get the most traffic when regular search engines aren’t cutting it. In the process, I’ve become fairly savvy with hashtags and keywords and regularity on Twitter, but it’s still a challenge to keep up with that form of communication.
Thanks for your feedback Brian, it is a challenge indeed.
I use Twitter to post my blog posts but I try to keep the socializing on a low side since I think it would be good to keep the conversations on the blog rather than there. Still, I think it works for some better.. for instance if I had a separate account from my personal Twitter. That would make me a bit more movie-blog-social, rather than annoying my friends who are not interested in movies as much.
I use Twitter a little but probably not as much as I should. I have an account for my blog and one for myself and I use my personal account much more. I might try and assimilate the two at some point. It’s nice to see people sharing my posts on there, even if I don’t notice a huge amount of traffic from it. Social media is definitely part of getting your blog noticed though, if you have the time for it.
Yeah, but that time is usually the problem 😉