Social Media: Increasing Reach, Promoting Engagement, and Measuring Results

Marist's Social Media Mark

I will conduct a "mini-lecture" during my February 18 office-hour session with graduate students in my COMI 500 Principles of IMC course (part of Marist's M.A. in IMC program). I'm sharing some of the material I will provide, which I adapted from another course that I teach in the IMC program: COMI 610 Social Media Strategies and Tactics.

Introduction

Many of my students view social media sites as channels for individual and group communication of a personal nature with friends and family members. And these students usually have a preferred social media account that they use to exchange personal information with their close-knit group. Other students refuse to establish a social media presence, fearing invasion of privacy and risks to personal identity information.

When I teach social media strategies and tactics from a public relations and marketing perspective, I stress the importance of treating social media as a business application. Social media provide a communication capability that can reach a variety of audiences and engage them in your business activities. As author Erik Qualman has described it in his best-selling book Socialnomics, "Social media transforms the way we live and do business."

Furthermore, social media activities require more than simply choosing your favorite site as a way to express yourself. It's about using digital influence networks, integrating a variety of social media channels, and coordinating your message in ways that 

• extend your reach to many audiences, not just those following your Facebook page;
• lead these audiences to your main site or message; and 
• engage them in a two-way dialog that will develop long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships with your organization.

Example

I maintain a personal and an official digital presence on the World Wide Web through a variety of social media channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, Blogger, etc. My public relations news blog, powered by Google's Blogger, is one of my main sites for hosting conversations about the communication profession, teaching and learning, technology, and other business-related topics.

To illustrate how social media integration can improve reach and engagement, I will use a small-scale social media communication case that began on my blog. I chose the blog as my home base for this announcement, because a "web log" (blog) provides an ideal forum to release ample amounts of information, in posts that contain many useful hyperlinks and visually-appealing images, with a comment stream that allows for interaction. 

This case involved the announcement of a spring 2013 student internship opportunity for communication students in the School of Communication and the Arts at Marist College. This communication effort was designed to promote awareness of this opportunity to student, family, professional practitioner, and faculty audiences -- with a goal of generating applications. Click this link to read the actual blog announcement, which was published on Dec. 14, 2012.

I have a relatively small following on my blog. Therefore, limiting the internship announcement to my blog would prevent this message from reaching its intended audiences. So, I used other social media channels to extend the reach of my message to many other audiences on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The Twitter Effect

Shortly after publishing my main blog post, I released a tweet that included the handle @MaristPRSSA, the Twitter identity for Marist's Red Foxes Chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America, a primary source of highly-qualified candidates for communication internships. Using a handle (@) to reply to or message someone directly on Twitter ensures that they will receive your tweet. 

To increase reach, I could also have included hashtags like #Marist or #PRSSA to extend the reach of this announcement to topic sites on Twitter where communication students might hang out. Hashtags often become popular trending topics on Twitter and they can be located by searching for a topic. 

A hashtag (the # symbol followed by a word or acronym) creates an active hyperlink in a tweet. Clicking the hashtag link takes you to a Twitter page that lists all other tweets that include the same hashtag. Hashtags, therefore, become a useful way to target your message to audiences that are clearly interested in that topic. Click the following link to learn more about #hashtags.

Monitoring my Twitter stream, I noticed that within two days my tweet had already reached influential opinion leaders (Jennie Donohue, a public relations faculty member at Marist, and the Marist PRSSA chapter) who used their own Twitter accounts to "retweet" my message to their followers.

I also received a "direct message" via Twitter from the president of the Marist PRSSA chapter, who indicated he would distribute the announcement to all Marist PRSSA members. The retweets and direct message (see below) represent "engagement" activities, or actions that go beyond merely reading a social media page. Think of engagement activities as the kinds of two-way dialog and interactions that you are seeking to achieve through social media.

A quick analysis of our two opinion leaders who "engaged" in my announcement will also reveal how the use of Twitter can increase reach as well as engagement. Jennie Donohue, professional lecturer in public relations at Marist, retweeted the message to a following of 139 other Twitter subscribers. The Marist PRSSA chapter has nearly 100 active members, and its Twitter stream is followed by nearly 500 other Twitter members.

The Facebook Effect

Like Twitter, Facebook provides another large audience and smaller publics organized by Facebook pages and groups that represent special interest topics and organizations. The School of Communication and the Arts and its master's program in integrated marketing communication at Marist have their own Facebook pages. After publishing my blog post and tweet, I published a status update about the announcement on these Facebook pages, below.

Click here to read about the differences between a Facebook personal profile, a Facebook business page, and a Facebook community group. Click here to watch a short video that also explains these differences. And click here for a short video tutorial that explains how to set up a Facebook page. 

TIP: To use Blogger's "Statistics" tool to analyze a Facebook account, you must use a business page, not a personal profile.

Using Facebook's Insights or a program like Google Stats or Analytics, I was able to determine with little effort how the school's Facebook page post had increased my engagement. Within a few days of the Facebook post, three people "liked" (expressed approval of) and five people "talked about" (shared, commented on, etc.) the announcement. These are not big numbers in the broader context of the Facebook community; however, I use them to illustrate on a small scale how Facebook can increase reach and engagement.

TIP: Click here to review how Google's statistics and analytics programs can help you evaluate the performance of your social media sites and activities.

The LinkedIn Effect

Using the approach described above with Facebook, I also extended the reach of my blog post by publishing an announcement and discussion item on Marist College's Public Relations Alumni and Student LinkedIn Group at bit.ly/redfoxprgroup. This group has over 800 members, from senior practitioners to current students, which represents a valuable, strategic audience. Although there are no current LinkedIn group site statistics that indicate reach or engagement, subsequent analysis will demonstrate how referrals from this site resulted in traffic to the original blog post.

Other Potential Effects (Pinterest, etc.)

Again, this is a small-scale demonstration, using only a blog and three other social media sites. Professional social media programs can become much more complicated and involve dozens of communication channels. Consider, for instance, the popular image-sharing site, Pinterest. Following up on my original blog post for the purposes of this demonstration, I "pinned" an image of Marist College's campus with an update about the internship opportunity. This image in the pin contains a hyperlink that, when clicked, will take viewers directly to my original blog post.

Results

Using Facebook Analytics (you could also use Pages Statistics) to evaluate the results of my small, integrated social media burst, I obtained the following data, recorded between Dec. 10 and 20.

Reach

In the days immediately preceding publication of my blog post on December 16, my blog had been receiving an average of four to five visits per day. As the messages across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn began to have an effect on December 16 and 17, visits to the site rose steadily to 16 on December 18. A total of 80 people visited the blog between Dec. 10 and 20, with the visits peaking on Dec. 18.

Traffic Sources

Evaluating the impact of the integrated communications across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it's important to note that 27.5% of traffic to the blog during this period came from searches (e.g., people finding the site through a Google search). 

Another 18.75% of the traffic came from direct visits, or people clicking directly to the blog (perhaps blog followers). The remaining 53.75% of the traffic came from referrals, or visitors who came to the blog directly from other sites. By identifying these sites, next, we can associate the referral sites with the publication of posts and tweets on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Referral Traffic

Data indicated that the majority of the traffic referrals (10) came from Google, which may indicate visitors who performed searches or who follow the blog and clicked on to the site from their Google accounts. Twitter (or t.co on the diagram, below) was the next most influential referral site, accounting for another eight visits. These are the other top referral sites:

• Facebook (4)
• Marist College (3)
• LinkedIn (2)

Conclusion

In summary, more evidence would be needed to show a direct relationship between the integrated social media activities and corresponding effects on traffic to the blog site. However, the timing and source of traffic referrals represent a positive correlation between the activities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and the reach and engagement of audience members who read or acted on the original blog post about the communication internship. 

Feel free to offer a comment.