Final Weekly Stats: Weeks 12
Over the last 12 weeks we have tweeted, blogged and facebooked to our hearts content to see if utilizing social media held a significant value for service-based business. Our initial goal was to gain 1,000 followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook to share our design ideas and inspirations (and hopefully boost our ROI).
From the first week of the experiment to the last, we didn't hit our goals, but did make satisfactory progress. We gained 346 Twitter followers, added 441 more users to our following list, and increased our Facebook fans by 62%, allowing us the ability to share our ideas and communicate with others. Our blog hits increased from 63 a week to 190 a week and our website hits averaged 174.5 unique viewers a week. Whether or not these new connections are leading to genuine business relationships is still up in the air for us. The connections seem intangible to our service-based business. That doesn't mean they are not valuable, just hard to measure.
(To see our overall stats from week 1 to week 12, click here.)
One problem we ran into was our potential client base is largely not yet on Twitter or reading the type of blog that we published. The average Twitter account holder is reasonably young, urban, and engaged online according to arstechnica.com. Our clients tend to be Directors of Marketing or CEOS, which most Twitter users are not.
We feel that there are things we could have done differently that would have produced better results. We could have blogged about more topics that we are passionate about, and make the blog much more personal. We could have twittered around the clock. Hind-sight is always 20/20.
However, the point of any experiment is not knowing exactly what will happen based on any variable. We went in to this the same way that most companies jump into Social Media, with virtually no strategy. More testing is definitely recommended. A great way to test the significance of Twitter strategies would be to conduct the experiment in a scientific manner: starting with a handful of brand new Twitter accounts and assigning each a specific strategy, with one being a control (no strategy) and assessing the value(s) of each strategy to service-based business.
Though this is the end of our experiment, we are not ending the experience. We will continue to tweet, blog, and facebook to represent ourselves and our ideas and will continue to post to this site with insights and observations about the universe of Social Media.
Keep watching us!
Hey guys, interesting experiment. It seems like everyone is scrambling to make some sense in terms of ROI for social networking. When you say "till your hearts content", what was your initial investment? 3,4, 5 hours a week finding info and posting? When looking at SN as a longterm strategy these costs are going to be indefinate. What was your final consensus on the overall profitability. I'm working on the answers and would love the feedback.
http://jonproeber.com/a-perspective-on-roi-for-social-networking-determining-brand-equity.html
Hi Jon. We easily spent 8-12 hours per week posting content and finding info. We definitely didn't make that back in terms of revenue. The intangible benefits will hopefully make up for it in the long term. Even after 3 months of investigation there are still a ton of unanswered questions.
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