by Philip James, Founder - Snooth.com

All Users Are Not Created Equal

When it comes to Social Media Optimization (SMO) there are plenty of options out there. Do you spend time writing your own blog, or can you just get away with commenting on others? What about press releases? You can submit them via sites like PR.com, but you can also try to get them on news sites like Digg. The same applies to social networks – who really has the time to maintain a profile on Facebook and mySpace, let alone LinkedIn, Plurk, Pownce, Twitter, Tumblr, Hi5 and so on.

There’s a limited amount of time in the day and it’s hard to justify throwing more resources at an unproven marketing concept. At Snooth, we face this issue too. SMO and ‘old fashioned’ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are basically our bread and butter, yet, even we can’t keep up with the profusion of networks.

We knew this when we launched, and so, over the past year we tracked how users from different sources behaved differently 6 months after they first came to the site. The results proved that bigger wasn’t always better.

We tracked over 25,000 users from around 20 different sources ranging from social networks to the British wine publication, Decanter. Whilst it may be possible to generate a flurry of traffic from sites like Digg and Techcrunch, the real acid test is how many of those users will be active on your site 6 months later. You want repeat customers, not an expensive web hosting bill.

To measure ‘engagement’ we looked at user involvement across several metrics including how often they logged in, how many wines they reviewed and some other metrics that were relevant to us.

On average, traffic from wine related websites was over 300% as engaged and active after 6 months than users who came from a non-targeted site. In some cases the difference was over 500%.

To put this in context, it means that you would just need 300 users from a site that has users had similar interests (like a wine blog, as an example) to equal the engagement that 1,000 random Facebook users would have.

Wine blogs, wine social networks and wine review sites attract people who want to learn about and buy wines. Wine groups on generic sites attract wine drinkers, sure, but the most passionate users are out on the web looking for the tightest communities.

With that, my recommendations: it’s a lot of work to get your own blog up and running with any serious readership. Being a visible supporter and commenting on bloggers who are focused on your market is a good proxy. As an example, if you are a Long Island based winery you need to be reading the Lenndevours blog, which is focused on NY State wines. The rest of your time should be spent engaging the most tightly knit targeted sites you can identify – these are the people that are willing to help carry your brand forward.

Philip James, Founder - Snooth.com

Philip James is the founder of Snooth, the world’s largest and most comprehensive wine database, featuring millions of reviews and hundreds of thousands of wines. Snooth has over 250,000 monthly users and makes it easy for wine lovers to find better wine, seamlessly purchase wine, and enjoy a community.

This entry was posted by admin on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Blog, Marketing, Press Releases, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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