Brandwatch viral article case study
October 7, 2011 Author: Tim Aldiss
UPDATE! Please click here to read an update on this social media case study
Brandwatch is a leading social media monitoring tool and No Pork Pies are lucky enough to be working with them on their online marketing.
Traditionally we’ve focussed on SEO and specifically increasing rankings for the term ‘social media monitoring’ and ‘social media monitoring tool’ (hence the link in the first line of this post! 8-). However there is only a very small new business channel through SEO for them as most referrals in this sector come from recommendations from others – word of mouth.
Recently we have broadened out our activity by testing targeting people like us at No Pork Pies – we are after all exactly Brandwatch’s target market – agencies with a social media monitoring tool need! To do this we are writing articles based around digital, social media, reputation management and data visualisation. It’s an interesting space with plenty of research that can be done. More interestingly is that there are good existing social networks for us to target that lap up this type of content when curated and written well.
Social Media Case Study #1
We published our first article on the Brandwatch blog last Thursday 29th September. The Brandwatch blog is linked up to their Twitter account which has nearly 3,000 followers so we were off to a good start! In fact on that day it was Twitter clients (t.co as a referring source) that drove 35% of the traffic to the site.
At 8.40 that evening the article was Stumbl’dupon culminating in a rather successful 116 views. At some point that day it was submitted to Digg and was ‘dugg’ 105 times. Very early on Friday morning it was shared on Reddit.com where it eventually received 24 ‘up votes’ and 5 comments.
As this exercise is more about brand awareness it’s hard to demonstrate the ROI that we have been able to with search, however there have been some demo requests through the website too. For us though the key metric is one of reach and here’s how we measured reach on this occasion.
As Twitter was a clear champion when it came to distribution we used a tool called TweetReach to measure this first article’s impact.
Results: In the week since submission 304 tweets have gone out featuring the article – 138 regular tweets, 158 retweets, and 8 replies; adding up all the followers of all these accounts to demonstrate potential reach we have 437,936 people (or accounts to be more exact); from these accounts taking sharing into account we can calculate that we achieved 942,160 impressions! Not a bad start
Most interestingly we can also see the network effect of Twitter and the potential impact on accounts of people most likely to be influenced by our article. Of those total people 234,052 saw the tweet once, 149,561 saw the tweet twice, 47,788 saw the tweet 3 times, and a whopping 6,535 people saw the tweet 4 times.
For the next article our intention is to measure targeting accuracy by interest and bio… and guess which tool we will be using… why Brandwatch of course!
Update!
A week has now passed since this activity which was conducted in isolation of any other search activity and it’s fantastic to see the indirect impact that this activity has had on SEO. As of this morning the Brandwatch website is ranking top in an organic search for ‘social media monitoring’. Have a look for yourself… Although it was not our prime directive it just goes to show the integration of search and social media when it comes to great content, distributed well.
About the author Tim Aldiss
2 Responses to “Brandwatch viral article case study”
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October 7th, 2011 at 9:31 pm
great work Tim. And i loved the article!!
October 14th, 2011 at 10:22 am
Thanks Giles