MARK 9049 Blog Review
1) BACKGROUND
The Social Media Explorer blog is maintained by SME Digital (the SME stands for Subject Matter Experts), a digital / social media agency focussed on “ROI-driven results by measuring marketing’s effectiveness”. SME Digital has a remote structure (no central office), and the blog appears to be not only a marketing tool for the agency, but also a community tool for the various members of the team.
Content is posted 2–3 times per week, and it’s heavily concentrated on social media marketing. Most posts are written by members of the agency, which are original content, but there are a few guest contributors (in these cases, the posts can be found in a number of places other than this blog).
I chose Social Media Explorer because I found the articles to be practical, actionable, relatively short, and easy to read. You won’t find anything super complicated, or any deep dives into theory — the articles are typically presented in a ‘how to’ style, and the title of each post (for examples, see the 5 posts I selected in the next section) pretty much tells you what you’re going to get. I see this blog helping me when I go to set up a new social media profile on a platform I’m familiar with, but would be looking for strategy tips and tricks to make profile more effective.
This blog looks nice (simple, toned down graphics with plenty of white space make it visually appealing), but has a fairly standard layout. A couple of features that standout include a 3x4 grid of stories represented by squares at the top of the blog (the squares feature the title of the post on top of an image or a colourful background), and a list of social media metrics at the side of the page that show how many social shares each post has received.
Here’s a summary of the social media channels associated with the blog, along with number of followers and a brief summary of the type of content found on each:
Facebook: 30,388 Likes
https://www.facebook.com/socialmediaexplorer/
Content Summary: Every blog post and Instagram post gets posted to Facebook. There are a few items that don’t appear on the blog: most of these focus on the company’s CEO, Nichole Kelly — specifically some media appearances, and about a book she’s written. While there are a few other types of posts (a motivational quote and pictures with the hashtag #MondayMotivation), there are no curated posts from other blogs or social media channels.
Twitter: 1,940 Followers
Content Summary: Their twitter account links to every blog post, and is a little more active than the blog (there are approximately 3–5 tweets per week). Again, mostly original content with very few retweets (some posts point to other content but via a bitly link — I would say retweets only come up once out of every 50 tweets).
Instagram: 1,045 Followers
https://www.instagram.com/socialmediaexplorer/
Content Summary: Their Instagram account is fairly new — the first post was from 4 months ago. There have only been 19 posts — and all are the same format: a marketing related quote over an image.
LinkedIn: 1,273 Followers
https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-media-explorer
Content Strategy: Set up as a company page, their LinkedIn account features approximately 1–2 of their blog posts per month (at least in the last 6 months; before that, there were posted more frquently) — so not every post gets distributed through LinkedIn.
2) BLOG POST REFLECTION
Here are the 5 blog posts I selected, along with a summary of social shares (total shares listed first, then the top 5 platforms are detailed which each of their share totals) and comments. There were very few comments on these posts, but the number of shares were quite high. I found that the content was written to be shared (it’s short, to the point, and has a business focus), and I’m sure was read much more widely on platforms other than the blog. I later found out why the comments were low: in order to comment you had to log in with a social media account which appeared to give them all kinds of access to your information. Ultimately I signed in with a service called Disqus — and I still think I allowed access to some of my personal info!
Blog Post #1:
total shares: 420 / linkedin: 159 / buffer: 94 / facebook: 78 / fb likes: 33 / google+: 31 / comments: 0
Reflection:
I chose this post because I was interested in learning more about social media management tools. I was surprised at how closely the 4 services ranked amoungst each other. I don’t know that I came away from this post with many insights — other than Hootsuite is a lot more affordable than the rest. I was even more surprised by some references to Agora Pulse at the end of the post that appears to be branded content… I asked about it in the comments but received no reply.
my comment: I noticed the side by side comparison between Agora Pulse and Hootsuite, and also a pop-up window asking if I’d be interested in receiving more information from Agora Pulse. Just curious, was this article paid for by Agora Pulse? (I’m not currently using any of these tools — and have no axe to grind with any of those mentioned — was just curious about how those additional features came about). Thanks!
Blog Post #2:
total shares: 212 / linkedin: 57 / google+: 51 / facebook: 50 / buffer: 34 / fb likes: 13 / comments: 0
Reflection:
I chose this post because I thought it would have an interesting take on optimizing when and how often to post on social media. This metric, social half-life, acts as another level of measurement — beyond just engagement, this breaks down how fast that engagement is happening. While it would be difficult (and painstaking) to measure this yourself, I found the results from over 100 brands insightful. The survey underlines how disposable individual social media posts are — the results suggest that if you can avoid burn-out, your brand should be posting on Twitter every hour, and on Instagram every two hours.
Blog Post #3:
total shares: 441 / linkedin: 138 / google+: 94 / facebook: 74 / fb likes: 72 / buffer: 58 / comments: 2
Reflection:
I chose this post because I loved one of the four companies that was interviewed: Barkbox. I learned about their brand ambassador strategy when working on a pet-related project, when I interacted with many of these brand ambassadors. I am really impressed by this strategy, and feel it’s a really good example of earned media: the brand ambassadors work really hard to get their status, and as a result, work hard to promote the brand. I would have enjoyed a more in-depth interview however. I commented on the post asking for more details, but did not receive a reply.
my comment: Loved that BarkBox was featured! I imagine their strategy of creating brand ambassadors is really effective (it’s really the only advertising I’ve ever seen from them). And considering the cost of that campaign (my understanding is they provide a BarkBox to each ambassador each month), I’m sure they get an incredible ROI! Did they share any sales / growth numbers with you since they started that campaign??? Thanks!
Blog Posts #4 & #5:
Sep 9, 2015: How to Gain 500 Instagram Followers in 7 Days the Honest Way — Pt. 2 Pt.2 of 2
total shares: 242 / linkedin: 73 / facebook: 57 / buffer: 50 / pinterest: 31 / google+: 21 / comments: 3
Sep 2, 2015: How to Gain 500 Instagram Followers in 7 Days the Honest Way — Pt. 1 Pt. 1 of 2
total shares: 313 / linkedin: 83 / buffer: 73 / facebook: 71 / google+: 33 / fb likes: 29 / comments: 5
Reflection (for part one and two): I chose these two posts because there was a lot of content, and a fairly in depth strategy presented. Having lived this process (creating an Instagram account from scratch and growing it to 1000 followers), I found these posts fascinating. Organic growth is definitely the way to go — this article describes the pitfalls of buying likes and followers. While I didn’t do that — I did try something similar at the beginning; mass following many users hoping they would follow back. That led to have a following/follower ratio that was all out of whack and required a lot of unfollowing to bring things back to a reasonable ratio. As I’ve mentioned in class, the strategy of ‘engaging the hashtag’ was what was the most successful — and these posts basically describe that process. I also found the links to new tools (like Social Blade and CrowdFire) helpful. I’ll definitely be checking those out for my next Instagram project!
3) SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
While I have reached out to Social Media Explorer, I haven’t received much engagement back. Likely I didn’t give them enough time to respond back to me. Here’s an overview of my outreach:
Comments on the Blog:
In the Blog Post Reflection, I listed two blog posts that I commented on. I also commented on the follow blog posts:
Facebook:
I commented on two of their Facebook posts, one saying thanks for posting, and the other asking for more information.
Twitter:
I retweeted one of their tweets regarding Instagram allowing you to switch between accounts without logging out & back in (RT Awesome!) and in a desperate move to generate some engagement, I tweeted the following earlier today: “Love your blog! I’m writing a SME blog review for social media class & need engagement! Tweet me back & I’ll send you the review!”.
Medium:
Finally, I have posted this review on my Medium account.
4) CONCLUSION
I enjoyed embarking on this blog review for the Social Media Explorer blog.
I learned quite a bit from this review:
I found the format of the blog (as a marketing/community tool for a digital agency) to be really effective.
I realized how they wrote these articles to be sharable (and saw the results in their social shares).
I checked out a bunch of new social media tools that I intend to employ in my social media strategy.
I was impressed with how they segmented what they shared on their different social media channels — it was cool to see this in action (as opposed to talking about it).
I would recommend this blog to a number of people. First to you Blair, as I think it could definitely show up in your list of resources (especially for the “How to gain 500 Instagram followers…” posts). I would recommend it to other social media marketers in particular because they do a good job highlighting different tools. And as I stated at the beginning, I find the way the posts are crafted to be easy to read, easy to use and very practical.
I’d say the main way this blog helped me in this course was seeing many of the lessons we learned being put to use on their many social media platforms. They’re sticking to a social media calendar. They’re producing original content in specific ways for specific channels (their instagram posts are a good example of this). They’re extending their reach by making the content shareable. I would say that they’re providing an excellent example for those who want to do social media the right way!
