This is the story of a blog post that I wrote a while back, and 2 big takeaways for us all.
It is easy to put the blinders on and tell yourself that your content is reaching your audience because your blog had some views, the link in your tweet was clicked or your group has lots of followers. Purely looking at the numbers at a high level won’t really tell you what is going on. You need to dig deeper into what the numbers mean, and who is making up those numbers.
I wrote a blog post called “Automation vs. Humanization” that was posted on our Flint-Group website. A few months later, I created an account on Social Media Today, and decided to submit that post to them. It was picked up and turned into one of the top posts of the day.
After watching the views rise quickly, I decided to compare the results. Here is what I found:
Views on the Flint-Group blog: About 200
Views on the Social Media Today blog: Over 3,200
Tweets from the Flint-Group blog: 2
Tweets from the Social Media Today blog: 82
Are you talking to yourself?
Purely looking at the high level numbers will also be deceiving in regards to “who” is reading your content. I work at an agency, and it is pretty typical for several co-workers to read my post after it has published. That’s great, but if your goal is reach and thought leadership, which will ultimately lead to new clients down the road, those internal views are essentially like talking to yourself. Removing your internal traffic from your analytics will tell the real story.
It’s not just blog posts though. The size of your Twitter following is sometimes used to measure the reach of your message. Quite often I hear people say something like “I can reach over 4,000 people through Twitter” because that is how many followers they have. Yes, you are posting it out to 4,000 people who have the opportunity to see your message, but how many of them are actually logged on to Twitter at the time of your post? Even if they are logged in, how many of your followers can keep up with every tweet that comes through? It is easy to get caught up in a dialog (Twitalog maybe?) and think that thousands of people are listening in, but the reality is, they just aren’t.
NOTE: If you are smart enough to make a tool that can tell how many of your followers actually were logged on to Twitter at the time of a tweet, or logged in after the fact and scrolled back to the tweet so it appeared on the screen, that would be helpful. Extra credit if the tool can actually guarantee that the tweet was read. GO! (and good luck)
