Content marketing – a year in review

Since July 2014, I have been recording the analytics data of my social media marketing efforts for e-BAS Accounts. I created a spreadsheet for this purpose and recorded data for Twitter, our Facebook page, our website and our newsletter. As it’s been one year since I began this “experiment”, I thought I would share the results with you.

Twitter Results

• Engagement rate (clicks, favourites, retweets, replies, follows) averaged around 2%
• The highest number of retweets was 42 in March 2015
• Followers number increased from 819 to 984
• Overall impressions (number of times our tweets were viewed) steadily increased throughout the year from 15K to 33K
• Most of our followers come from Sydney with Melbourne being a close second
• Most of our followers are males (70%).
• Our most popular blog post for the year at 34% was “Here I explain the new Xero partner program and provide thoughts on its viability”, followed closely at 32% by “The Xero business model is all about sell, sell, sell so you (the partner) can get more, more, more!”

Facebook Results

• Page likes increased from 126 to 169
• Most of our “likers” are female at 71%
• Most of our “likers” come from Melbourne, followed closely by Sydney
• Our highest organic reach (content posted without payment to Facebook) was 308
• Our highest paid reach was 1113
• Our most popular organic post was “25 Awesome Australian Bookkeeping Blogs”
• Our most popular paid post was “The GST is now 14 years old. Is it in need of an overhaul?”
• Most page visits received in any one month = 20

Website Results (via Google Analytics)

• New visitors averaged 85%
• Returning visitors averaged 15%
• Visitor gender – males 54% females 45%
• Visitor age averaged 25 to 34 years
• Site visits steadily increased throughout the year from 2397 to 12,578
• Most popular visitor country of origin = Australia
• Most popular visitor city of origin = Sydney
• Most popular blog post was “29 Common GST Mistakes” (for every month of the year – weird!)
• Second most popular post was “The difference between part time, full time and casual employees”
• Most popular page to visit was the Key Dates page.
• The social channel that sent traffic to the website the most was Twitter.

Newsletter Results

• Subscribers increased from 48 to 66 across the year
• Only 50% of subscribers opened each newsletter
• 3 subscribers unsubscribed
• On average, only 20% clicked on links in the newsletters

A Quick Synopsis

In terms of marketing, out of the 4 social channels above, Twitter is quite clearly the most successful. Engagement between us and our followers is much more prevalent than on any other channel and as can be seen from Google Analytics, most of our website visitors have come directly from Twitter. On the other hand, our least successful marketing tactic is our newsletter. While subscriber numbers rose marginally across the year, the number of actual subscribers and also percentage of those who opened the newsletter, is dismally low. The Facebook page is also fairly disappointing. Very few people visit the page and I find it sad that the only major interaction with the page comes from paid content. As far as the website goes, it’s very encouraging to see visitor numbers steadily increasing although I think this is giving our web hosting service a heart attack!! Something that I found odd regarding Google Analytics, was that it reported consistently that the same blog was getting the most hits. I’m not sure if that is just a glitch or if it’s actually true – if it’s true, this means there are a lot of people out there worried about GST mistakes!

Regarding those who connect with us, there are some quirky statistics:

• Interestingly, most of our Twitter followers are male while those who like our Facebook page are mainly female. The percentage of males against females who visit our website is fairly even.
• Most of our Twitter followers come from Sydney whereas, most “likers” come to the Facebook page from Melbourne. Google Analytics reports that most visitors come from Sydney like Twitter.
• The average age of website visitors is 25 to 34 years which aligns with the age group of most persons who are self-employed or who are starting a new business. This then makes sense that this age group would visit a bookkeeping website.

I will continue to track the statistics of these social channels throughout this financial year and will report those results next year!

PS – if the newsletter results don’t improve very much, you can pretty much wave goodbye to it! Hint hint – start subscribing peoples! ?