A Look Inside A Social Media Campaign

About six weeks ago we began to develop and implement a social media marketing plan for a soccer web site. Soccer Tickets Online is a new site and the initial focus of our social media marketing efforts has been to build brand awareness.

As I mentioned, Soccer Tickets Online is a new web site so the first goal of the campaign was to make people aware that the site exists. There are many different ways to approach that sort of goal, but the one we took was link baiting. We developed a page called “The best 5 soccer players of all-time” and submitted it to Digg. The post made the front page of Digg and crashed the server. Not a bad start

Like any social media campaign there were a couple of key learning’s. One was that we saw that we only needed 95 Diggs for the post to go popular instead of the hundreds that posts in other categories need. The reason for this is that soccer is not as competitive as other categories.

We also saw that while the post got only 95 Diggs, Digg drove 2,213 visitors to the web site. This verified something that we had previously thought which was that Digg takes into consideration the amount of times someone clicks on a title in addition to how many votes a post gets in deciding whether to make that post popular.

This piece of information shows the importance of writing a Digg Headline that encourages people to click through to the web site. The headline we used “Top 5 Soccer Players of all-time” is something that “baits” people to click on through and see who the five players were.

Due to the success of the top soccer players post, we followed it up a week two weeks later with a similar “link bait” post titled “The Best Young Soccer Players in The World”. Note the only reason we waited two weeks, was because of the holidays!

With our second piece of link bait, we wanted to see how this type of post would work on other social networks, and we wanted to spread the submissions over several days to see if that would increase the buzz and traffic.

The three social networking sites we submitted the post too were StumbleUpon, Digg and Netscape. On Digg the post went popular again while the StumbleUpon numbers were very strong. All told this post had 3,400 page views and the web site got 1,333 visits from StumbleUpon and 788 from Digg.

Unfortunately the Digg post got buried as some Diggers though that the URL soccerticketsonline.com was too commercial. This is a problem that is happening more and more on Digg and is something that we need to take into consideration when we do addition posts on Digg.

Six weeks into this social media campaign we have created five targeted social media events focused around creating awareness for the web site. We have been lucky in that 2 of the events went popular on Digg and 2 made the buzz page at StumbleUpon.

Last month StumbleUpon and Digg sent over 5,000 visitors to the web site. If the two posts had not been buried on Digg, the traffic numbers would have been a lot higher.

In addition to creating awareness about the site, one the other goals from this phase of the campaign was to use social media to get this web site out of any search engine sandbox. With 270 referrals from the search engines we are on our way to succeeding with this goal.

Now that we have build awareness of the site, our next step will be to focus on developing relationships with the soccer community, especially those sites that focus on MLS teams. Phase one was like an all out advertising blitz where phase two is much more tactical in its approach.

I will keep you updated in 30 days about how phase two of our social media marketing plain proceeding.

Article source: http://social-media-optimization.com/