MCG Internal Social Media Update

As many of you know, MCG recently upgraded its capabilities to include social media marketing. I’ve come into CMOthink’s fold talking about the new social media movement that seems to be sweeping the B2B marketing industry, but ultimately, we realize the importance of adding social media to your company’s integrated digital marketing campaigns because we’ve added it to our own, and it works.

Social media is a barrier-less way to reach your customers and engage them in conversation. Today, people are less interested in what your corporate website has to say, and more about what other people are saying about your brand, whether its through blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, or other forms of social media out there. Maybe it’s that by now, too many customers have been “burned” by a dishonest company, or that there are just so many cool websites for any product that people need more ways to differentiate.

Social media is such a unique platform because companies have no control about what is being said about them. On a corporate website, a company will obviously use glowing quotes and recommendations, but on social media, they could be getting torn apart by unhappy consumers.

I recently found an interesting quote from Forrester Research on social media: "Any company not creating a strategy, setting budgets, allocating resources, or setting policy is already behind."

This brings me to my update about MCG’s social media program.

We pledged that we would test any of our recommended strategies on ourselves to make sure they work. MCG’s task, beginning on January 1^st, was to expand our followership on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and to increase the amount of engagements with our audience on each platform. That would assure we were not only reaching a larger audience, but that our audience was more interested and engaged with us. Secondly, we would increase readership of the blog and our website, www.DemandMCG.com, especially increasing traffic coming to it from the aforementioned social media platforms. Now I’m going to show how we did.

Twitter:

In 10 weeks, we increased our Twitter followers from 298 to 935, meaning a 213.8% increase. We also increased our @replies on Twitter from close to zero per week to approximately 9 per week. That means we have increased the size of our audience while at the same time making sure they are more engaged with our brand.

Facebook:

In 10 weeks, we increased our “Likes” on the MCG Facebook page from 19 to 67, meaning a 252.6% increase. We also increased the comments on our page from approximately zero per week to about 4. Once again, we have increased the size of our audience while at the same time increasing engagement. We are one of the only marketing firms with the mission of making B2B sexy, and we want people to know that.

Blog:

Using social media, we have increased the readership of our blog steadily every month. In December, before the social media program started, we had 619 people read our blog, then in February, we had 1,119, almost doubling the amount. In March, we are on pace for over 1,300. In the list of traffic sources, MCG’s Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin weren’t even on the list before the social media program started. Now, they are the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th highest traffic sources to the blog.

Demandmcg.com

In the 10 weeks leading up to the start of our social media ramp-up, we had 64 visits from Facebook, 45 from Linkedin, and 17 from twitter. These sources were numbers 4,5, and 9 on the list of top traffic sources to the site. In the first ten weeks of our social media program, we had 70 hits from twitter, 55 from Linkedin, and 50 from Facebook. These sites are now numbers 3, 5, and 6 on the list of top traffic sources.

This shows that our social media presences are driving more traffic to our corporate homepage. The bounce rate for traffic coming from these social media sources decreased from 6%, which means that these visitors are looking around our site instead of checking out our homepage and leaving.

Conclusion

The data above shows that social media marketing works. It not only creates a larger web presence and helps drive traffic to your site, but social media organically helps your SEO efforts. Google’s algorithm gives points for inbound links to your site, and social media gives you an opportunity to leverage content sharing and conversation to accomplish this goal.

Social media is demand generation and lead nurturing at it’s finest. With more than 500 million people on Facebook and close to 200 million people on Twitter, there is an enormous audience out there, waiting to hear what you have to say. What are you doing to reach them?