It’s pretty well known in Social circles that your follower numbers, or subscribers, in no way relates to the number of people actually engaged with your content. For instance, Adland has over 7,000 followers on Twitter, but do they all read what we publish? Heck no!
But we see that we’re included on a number of targeted lists which people follow specifically for the subject matter. But how do you know what content of yours people are reading, passing on to their networks, or even contacting you about as result?
There are many tools out there to track whatever you like, and there are plenty of articles on them without going into too much detail here. But this is what we use…
We’ve used plenty of online tools for ourselves and our clients — some are really complex, others are easy to use and even intuitive. We like easy, which is why we use Google Analytics. On its own it is great, but when integrated with other simple yet powerful time-saving tools, it really comes into its own. One such tool is Posterous, which is what we use for Adland’s blog. With Posterous (@posterous), we write our content once, or share other content, and then post it to Posterous, which we have set up to automatically post it to other platforms that we use, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, YouTube, Vimeo, Blogger, WordPress, etc.
This is great on two levels:
- Time — we write it once and send it everywhere with one click (we can even email our post, along with video, audio and pics to post@posterous.com) and
- Reach — the same message reaches a far more diverse audience, than if we used just one platform alone.
You see, someone will subscribe to your YouTube account for an entirely different reason than someone else will subscribe to your Twitter account. They have different triggers for engaging with your content. But when comparing the two audiences, as people, they still have the same sorts of desires and needs, that hopefully your content will satisfy. If not, we can simply choose to not post to one or more of the platforms we use.
From a business perspective it makes sense to discover what works. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t see. So, back to the point of this post.
We have Google Analytics tracking our Posterous account (actually we have a number of Posterous blogs/sites which we manage from the one account). In an instant we can see what’s worked and what hasn’t. Bear in mind a lot of what we disseminate is not propaganda. What we try to do is share information we think is relevant to our audiences. Relevant is the key word. Is this information useful to our audience? A lot of our audiences know what we do and what we’re interested in, so we have little chance of upsetting people or wasting their time.
We have a small number of subscribers to our main blog at Posterous, but with the inclusion of Google Analytics, Posterous is one of the most powerful tools we use. Because we can see what content people are spending time reading, responding to and forwarding to their networks (all from posting an item once). And despite our small subscriber numbers we can see that our blog is visited by people from 32 countries around the globe. Now that’s pretty cool.
