My Own Personal Social Media Marketing Case Study

Whoa. I thought Twitter was over hyped as a marketing and communication tool. I was wrong.

Last Wednesday, I launched Which Test Won? my new publication for professional online marketers. Aside from less than $20 worth of Google AdWords ads and a partner's press release, all of the marketing for the site was via social media. It wasn't anything fancy, I just posted notes to my personal Twitter account, updated my Facebook page and my LinkedIn status, plus of course a quick post here at my blog. I'd been on personal hiatus for awhile before that and not actively doing any list building or self-promotion, so my total connections between all of these were roughly 1,500 people. Actually maybe fewer once you account for overlap.

The first week's traffic was way better than I anticipated. I expected a few hundred, not thousands! 60% of traffic was direct, so I don't officially know where those people came from, but it had to be word of mouth because there was nothing else out there. 34% of traffic was directly traceable to social media. Here's the breakdown:
44% Twitter
24% Facebook
22% 3rd party blogs (thank you!)
7% LinkedIn
3% This blog

You'd think by looking at this that the bulk of my connections were on Twitter -- but it's not the case. My personal Twitter list was tiny compared to my LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. Instead, I think Twitter drove so much more traffic because it goes viral so easily. Without prompting, friends, fans, and friends of friends all started Twittering about my new site amongst their connections. In comparison, LinkedIn doesn't make passing messages along very easy, so traffic was very low.

But that doesn't mean the lower-responding social media weren't worthwhile. Often the people who started Twittering had first heard about my new site via one of the other social media. So, it's all interconnected. You should not do just one.

Lastly, I've already noticed that Google is picking up Twitter references to my site very quickly in organic listings. When I Googled WhichTestWon this morning, multiple Twitter references came up, enabling me to dominate the search results... admittedly for my own brand name. But hey, it's better than a poke in the eye, and I can't help but hope it will lead to greater organic glory over the longterm.

So, go Twitter go! I'll report on more stats later as I gather them.

Yeah! My newest online publication Which Test Won? is now LIVE

The mystery is at last revealed. Anne Holland Ventures Inc have just released our first new online publication, a site called Which Test Won?

It's all about A/B split testing and multivariate testing. Every week we'll be featuring a new real-life testing example you can vote on, and then see how your gut stacks up against the actual test results. Plus, it's got a 125-term testing glossary and heaps of "know-how" information.

A big thank you to Google's Tom Leung who helped by reviewing the Testing Glossary content -- it's a 40-page document so it was a bigger job than you'd think. Any mistakes or subjective comments in it are mine, not his! Also, thanks to my Senior Reporter Natalie Myers who stepped in to quality control the final site most of last night and this morning when my (older) eyes started burning from too many hours of squinting at the screen. Again, any errors you'll find now are my fault, not hers.

A piece of ancient Chinese wisdom soothes me at times like these: all pots must have at least one tiny crack to let the soul in.

Site Launch Hell - Ending Soon? My 20-Point Checklist

How did I forget about this? It's so fun to dream up new online publications to launch. To dash off ideas on scrap paper. To think you're handling it great this time, so organized this time, good team on your side this time....

And then, it's no fun at all. Well, some fun. There's just all these little things I forgot about. Admin stuff, and I really hate admin. Let's just say, Not My Strength. Catch myself wishing for an admin army to sweep all operational duties off my shoulders, then remember how much I also hated it when my last company grew too big. Smaller is more fun. Right?

My (short version) checklist for launching a new online media company's first publication:

#1. Pick parent company name. Incorporate. Get EIN number. DONE

#2. Open company bank accounts & put money in them. Get company Discover card for the cash-back bonus, then discover hardly anyone useful takes discover. DONE

#3. Hire the launch team: reporter, editor, customer service/admin, freelance designers & developer. Discover to my horror my new admin guy has a long pre-paid vacation for peak of launch activity late-May through mid-June. Smile nicely and wish him well. DONE

#3. Give reporter & editor their detailed assignments, deadlines, tables of contents, potential interview source lists and editorial blueprints. Set up BasecampHQ account to manage it all. Promptly forget password. Never go back but apparently they are happily using it (shh, don't tell anyone.) DONE.

#4. Register Domains. DONE (ok, sort of ongoing, but I'm an idea person.)

#5. Pick hosting service. DONE (badly and then re-done.)

#6. Get email set up for staff. DONE

#7. Figure out how to make company email work for my own Outlook box. FAIL repeatedly. I am the only member of staff still using my Gmail account for business email. Shame. Shame.

#8. Get phone lines for everyone. DONE

#9. Buy entire landmasses of office supplies and equipment. DONE.

#10. Negotiate with key launch business partners & sign contracts. DONE

#11. Pick an email service provider DONE (aWeber, I always wanted to work with them!)

#12. Set up new lists & autoresponders and make sure it all ties back to the right forms on the publication site - not finished quite yet...

#13. Set up Twitter account for myself as well as first launch publication - DONE (So easy. Yeah!)

#14. Launch formal parent company site - random late night stabs, and finally ABANDONED. Who needs a corporate home page anyway? Maybe later.

#15. Write roughly 150 pages of content myself for first new launch publication site. Worry I've gotten some topical detail wrong, ask a world expert to review it. Get his, thankfully brief, changes. Do final doc edits. - DONE!!!

#16. Post all this content onto new CMS system. What do you mean Wordpress can't take an upload from a spreadsheet and we have to post each individual post by hand? Not done yet. Maybe tomorrow.

#17. Pick topic, date, & co-speaker for launch webinar. Also pick webinar hosting tech. Recoil in horror when it becomes clear the webinar company's registration forms are not optimized. Can we use our own? No. Grin & bear it. DONE.

#18. Edit & approve graphic design for first publication site. Hand to developer. Work with him so it looks as nice as the graphic designed version did. DONE.

#19. Create all the forms for first publication site. Spend hours trying to figure where to send the form-fill information -- perhaps SalesForce or ZOHO CRM, hate everything. It's all overkill and who wants to learn CRM program bells and whistles. Lose patience. Give up. Won't admin guy be happy when he comes back from vacation?!

#20. Answer emails and phone calls from old friends and colleagues asking what my first launch publication will be about, with a pleasant "Wait and see" (continual and seemingly unending.)