The Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Unit’s use of the Twitter micro-blogging platform got a recent thumbs-up from the good folk at ENN (see “Web Pick”), so I thought I’d provide a bit more detail on what we’ve been up to that might warrant such praise.
The eBusiness Unit host and maintain an online discussion forum / mailing-list dedicated to all things Web-related. The purpose of the forum is to provide a friendly and practical space where participants can feel comfortable asking questions and raising issues that are important to them, regardless of their level of knowledge of eBusiness. The forum has been existence for a number of years, and has quite an active community, discussing (often heatedly!) topics ranging from recommendations for Content Management Systems, to domain registration issues, and that old reliable, Search Engine Optimisation.
One of the problems with the forum has been trying to get an understanding of its reach, largely due to issues with the technology used. Although consistently referred to as a forum, it’s actually powered by a mailing list (Lyris ListManager) – members receive email updates as each new posting is approved, or they can choose to receive a daily digest. To create a new post, registered members simply send an email to the automated list manager email address. However, Lyris also provides a web interface that allows registered users to submit new posts, and an archive feature that allows both registered and unregistered users search previous posts. Lyris provides stats for email deliveries, so we know how many people are receiving the messages each day, but for a long time we had no way of knowing what sort of traffic was going to the archive – which was a shame as we felt that there was some really good content there, and it would be a shame if it was going to waste. After a struggle, we managed to get Google Analytics (GA) installed, and the stats it revealed were pretty disappointing…
The above graph from GA shows Page Views from November 16th 2009 (when GA was switched on), until December 31st 2009 (Full dashboard report is here). The figures are extremely low, not withstanding the spike on December 7th when our fortnightly newsletter is pushed out to subscribers. One of the most disappointing issues for me was that the vast majority of our traffic was direct, with less than 2% coming from the search engines. Lyris isn’t well optimised from an SE perspective, but I thought that the domain age and content would still have weighed in its favour.
Over the Christmas break I had come across a new web-based app called dlvr.it, which allows you to push an RSS feed to a Twitter and/or Facebook accounts, and gives some nice shiny stats on click-throughs and reach (note: there are plenty of other services that do likewise). Lyris does have an RSS feed switched on by default, so I created a new Twitter account (@entirl_eforum) and plugged them together using dlvr.it. Each post to the forum creates a new tweet, which consists of the thread title, and a shortened link to the forum, see below:
The first tweet went out on January 15th 2010, and the account has been chugging along ever since. I use my own Twitter account to give it a push every now and again, plus the team at ENN (who moderate the discussion forum on EI’s behalf) have been occasionally re-tweeting the content as well. The account has 65 followers as of March 10th, and the growth has been quite strong, increasing ten-fold over the past month:
According to the dlvr.it stats, over the past month we’re averaging 15.6 clicks per post, with an “average extended reach” of 435. So what does this look like on the GA stats?
Looking at the period from when the Twitter account was switched on until today, and comparing it to a comparable previous period, we saw a 113% increase in Page Views, and a 104% increase in Visits. We still haven’t made much of an impact on our search engine traffic however – it actually fell by 18% on the previous period, so we’ll need to work on that. Referrals from Twitter went from 9 to 93 (a 933% increase!), I’m guessing that the shortfall between this figure and what dlvr.it is reporting can be ascribed to the number of people using 3rd-party applications such as Tweetdeck to interact with Twitter. Full GA report for the period is here.
This is far from a rigorous scientific study – for instance, I’m not taking into account the difference in the number of threads posted on the forum during the two periods being compared. Despite this, the increase in traffic has been substantial, with only the smallest amount of resources needed to set the new delivery route up. Hopefully the Twitter account will continue to gather followers and we will see increasing levels of engagement on the discussion forum.
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