Do social media campaigns really work?

Back in August we started a series of articles looking closely at the likes of Twitter, as well as blogging for your business. Since we launched our new website in May 2010 and began our own social media campaigns we've seen a steady increase in enquiries from both existing clients and new "leads" alike. So, do social media campaigns really work?

Social media covers a wide range of platforms and products, from Facebook to Twitter, but at the very least you should be writing regular blogs to attract the attention of search engines such as Google, and this is even more relevant now with the recent introduction of "Google Caffeine". With Google's "caffeine" indexing system leading the charge, your blog can be indexed within 24 hours (we've heard of instances where this occurs even quicker, try less than 8 hours!). The point of all of this is to drive traffic back to your website, so it's up to you to use all of the tools at your disposal and social media is fast becoming an essential business tool.

Together with blogs, Twitter is the perfect way to announce to a wide audience a recently posted blog. Simple enough formula; post blog, mention blog on Twitter, then monitor inbound traffic on that day using Google Analytics to measure the response. By doing precisely that, we've noticed a nice increase in traffic especially around the times that we publish a blog and announce it using Twitter. Traffic to that particular blog tapers off after that, but the proof is very much in the pudding, our efforts are paying off and we're no different to most businesses, i.e. the formula is pretty much the same regardless of who you are, what you sell or what you write about. Become the expert in your field and use social media campaigns!

This 2-way combo is only effective if your blogs are positioned and hosted on your website rather than a 3rd party specialist-blogging website. Let's say that you had a walk-in office and an advertising banner in a bus shelter inviting people to visit you, you wouldn't give them the address of a waiting room or foyer in the hope that they eventually jump in the elevator and come on up! In other words, send traffic directly to you - your website - rather than somewhere around the corner - a 3rd party website - hoping that visitors eventually stumble through your door. Blogs posted on your own website also do plenty of favours for your website as a whole because Google loves fresh content no matter how you deliver that content, i.e. as a new blog or as a new page of information/new products and so on.

Give us a call if you'd like to introduce blogs and/or Twitter feeds and links to your current website. Social media campaigns are working for us and it could be achieving similar things for your organisation too.

So, 6 months on, do social media campaigns really work? You betcha'!