What is social media publishing?
Do a search on Google and you’ll end up with a load of stuff that’s unrelated to it. See, it’s a new term, or at least our definition is a new application of the term. FastCompany’s Karrie Sullivan did a post on her blog a couple of months ago, which sums up the process, but I thought it might be useful for me to define it here, too.
social media publishing, the Republic definition, combines traditional editorial principles with the latest social media tools to help brands create and engage with online communities.
For us, the foundation of any solid social media strategy requires a brand (be it one who isn’t traditionally a publisher, or like Electricpig.co.uk one that is) to have somewhere online where the conversation can begin, end or at least be hosted. This doesn’t mean brands suddenly get to own the conversation, but they can facilitate it.
We use our editorial expertise to create a destination for users (and fans of the brand) to congregate and find out what’s happening on a daily basis. At the centre of our editorial strategy sits daily updates, designed to reveal what’s new and interesting from inside the brand, and bring together what’s being said from outside the brand (on other blogs or websites). Combined, this forms a pretty compelling environment for users to come and interact with the brand.
That’s the publishing side. Getting readers to come and visit a site is challenging though, and sometimes you need to take the site to them. That’s where the social media side comes in. Solid tools such as email and RSS enable us to get content to where readers want it. Newer tools, such as Twitter, do a similar job and also provide a new and additional environment for the brand and users to interact. Video is best published (shared) on YouTube and frequently that’s also where we’ll congregate to comment on what’s being watched.
More active users of course will spend time coming to the site, typically through finding something on a search and most will actually stick around, whilst some will come back. Quite frequently.
All this adds up to enabling brands to create and engage online users, ultimately turning non-customers into customers and existing customers into enthusiasts and evangelists.
And it works, too. Not that we’re surprised, but traffic across our sites has increased by up to 300 per cent over the last three months compared with the previous quarters. Social Media Publishing isn’t a quick win, but instead is focussed on building long term value and genuine results.
Recently we’ve been trying to quantify what we do, in real terms so as to better demonstrate the return on investment for social media publishing. The results, have astounded even us. It typcially costs about £2 to get someone to visit a brand’s website through an ad campaign. That’s assuming that brand can buy advertising at £5 per thousand. With a fairly generous 2.5 people clicking through per thousand, the CPC is pretty high. Easy to explain then why more brands are putting emphasis on search, where CPC can be closer to the 20-50 pence mark. Each of these is designed to present something to a potential customer which they might deem appealing, get them to click through and then hopefully, get them to buy something.
The social media publishing model, by comparison can cost as little as 5-15 pence per visitor, per month, if measured on a CPC basis. The beauty of it being, the more people who visit, the cheaper it becomes. What’s more, these visitors don’t tend to drop by once and then move on. If they like what they see (generally they do) they’ll come back again. And again. Over time the site builds and audience (or a community) which then self perpetuates, building and growing as it goes.
We’ve had sites go from zero to 200k uniques users in six months. All the whilst, the equivalent cost on a CPC basis is dropping and the value delivered rapidly increasing. All in all, we think it’s cracking value. Seems our clients do too.
