Social Media Marketing on Tiny Little Blogs

Wanna know why everyone’s blathering on about how much Facebook and Twitter are worth? Why companies are tripping over themselves to get on Twitter? Or why everyone is trying to pass themselves off as social media marketing consultants all of a sudden? I’ll show you.

Yesterday, I read a hilarious blog post that my sister-in-law Jessie had written a few days before. Every year my mother-in-law somehow gets a hold of a list of names given to babies in a hospital in Rexburg, Idaho, and supplies Jessie with it for a blog post. If you know anything about Rexburg, you know it’s rural, overwhelmingly Mormon, and home to BYU Idaho (14,000 students, 26% of which are married). It’s like a perfect storm for crazy baby names. Great fodder for a great blog post, and Jessie totally nailed it.

I loved the post and wanted all my friends to read it, so I posted it on Twitter, from whence it was copied over to Facebook. I have a small group of 350 Twitter followers, and a group of 500 facebook friends. I’ve met and personally know all my Facebook friends, and I know maybe thirty percent of my Twitter followers, so overall it’s a fairly tight-knit group. (By contrast, PCMag’s Editor in Chief Lance has six THOUSAND followers, and my friend Natali has 15K, but I’m more of the typical Twitter user–they’re celebrities, at least within our tech sphere.)

Jessie provided me with her traffic numbers from yesterday, and I was astounded. She got 19 clickthroughs from Twitter, and 53 from Facebook. Now, those sound like small numbers, but that’s a 5% clickthrough rate from my Twitter followers, and a whopping 10% from my Facebook friends. 1 out of 10 of my Facebook friends not only SAW the link, but CLICKED on it—wow.

I’ve run a couple Facebook ad campaigns, one for my band during our Olympic hype, and another for my stupid cat blog (I should say, my stupid and practically defunct cat blog). I did it mostly out of curiosity, and the click-through rates were pretty average for FB ads, I think: around 0.1 percent. I wasn’t thrilled by that rate, but I was satisfied with it, as Facebook ads are known for being underperformers.

Here’s where social media marketing comes in. One out of a thousand people might click on an ad that a company pays to put on the Facebook sidebar. 1 in 10 might click on a link in a Facebook friend’s feed. Note that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison: 1/1000 people who SEE a Facebook ad click on it. 1/10 who are FRIENDS with the person who posted the link click on it. For the numbers to make any sense, I’m betting as many as 50 or 60 percent of my friends who saw the link clicked on it. And as friends leave comments, I’m betting the click-through rate gets even higher.

In other words, if a company or brand can find its way into your Facebook feed, it’s golden. Especially if your friends then pick it up and share it with their friends.

A Facebook friend of mine is a contributing writer for a great Mormon blog called “By Common Consent” that gets between 15K and 20K unique visitors a month, according to Compete.com
. He loved Jessie’s blog post and got it added to BCC’s sidebar of links. That little link in the sidebar was good for another 165 clicks to the blog.

These are small potatoes, of course—micro-level stuff that I’m just using by way of example. Jessie and I are just specks in the Twitterverse, and less than specks in the blogosphere. But everyone on Twitter and Facebook and Blogger are talking about stuff, throwing links around, and talking about their favorite and least favorite brands. That stuff carries way more weight than an ad does, so companies want in on the action. And if a company can get a mention from Lance, with his 6K Twitter followers, or from @KevinRose with his 433,376 followers, even better.

Now go read Jessie’s post. It’s way funnier than this one.