Using social media to increase traffic

Publisher of local print and online real estate magazine, Network Communications Inc (NCI) wanted to shake up its model and increase online reach in the hyper-competitive real estate niche.    The company instituted a new policy for everyone in sales and editorial to share their interactions in the community via social media — that is blogs, Twitter and Facebook.  The strategy paid off, driving a  30% increase in reach for the sites in the first two months,  Prescott Shibles of Vital Business Media reported.

Defining the Challenge

NCI first identified  challenges  that are hardly unique to local real estate publishers:

1. Readers have a lot more sources for content
2. Advertisers have less money to spend
3. Advertisers say “Internet” when they mean they have no money

In short, the future looked dismal unless something changed. Sound familiar?

Creating a strategy

Dan McCarthy, CEO, realized the untapped potential of having a local staff - editors and sales people interacting on the street - that could not be matched by online-only national brands.

“Every day, editorial and sales staff are meeting with members of the community we serve,” he said. "Those interactions and insights go undocumented and unshared in the traditional assembly-line model. Now, every time a staff member interacts with the community, it can become content, used to engage readers. Each brand and each staff member has a blog, a Twitter account, and a Facebook fan page to help them connect with the community.”

Rather than peck away at Twitter or Facebook usage, or attempt a singular yet massive company account, McCarthy apparently  jumped into the pool  with all of his corporate clothing and everyone got wet. Here’s his official explanation:

“If we create more channels to engage in more ways with more of the market, we will increase our engagement, enhance our importance, and offer more cost-effective ways for marketers to use our brand to build their image, interact with customers and drive more business.”

That means of course that a company with 25 employees has 25 promoters out there leveraging  institutional relationships and building new ones. Of course, in order to share what they were doing, employees were allowing a lot of their lives with the company out on the street.

Control freaks may now leave the room.  The  “Message control”  of scripted sales plans and a singular vision of what to share and not share with customers are replaced by actual two way communication on and offline.

Sure some  employees may take their enhanced personal brand - built on company time -  with them or let something inappropriate slip into their public personae.  But I suspect that this strategy also gives the staff a sense of ownership,  that employee’s personal brands are now also linked with the company, and that employees are no more eager to forget the privacy settings than their boss.

Plus, it take the onus off the overworked editorial staff to carry the entire promotional load for the company by doubling- up on output to twitter, facebook and blogs.  Everyone is in the game.

Results

NCI’s McCarthy says that socializing the entire company  has both improved search, since there are more ways to find the sites via blogs, and also made his media company less reliant on search,  where competitors are most visible. It’s like the way print  used to sell against the Yellow Pages; the people who are in the Yellow Pages and search engines are people who do not already have a relationship. Form a relationship and search becomes irrelevant. In fact, unique visitors grew by 21% in two months and grow its total reach by more than 30%.

For instance, McCarthy’s blog, ViralHousingFix, captures readers in the following ways:

• 30% direct navigation (going to the homepage, clicking on a tweeted link)
• 30% referring traffic (blogs, comments on blogs, other links)
• 23% search engines
• 17% other (email, promotional campaigns)

It probably some leadership to convince the staff to enthusiastically “socialize”, but there were a portion of the staff that had been waiting for this change to catapult the company into internet relevancy  salvage their job and create a better resume.

The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and  MediaExecsTech,  developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine,  to showcases perspectives from around the  world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.

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