14th June '17
Look, We Promise Social Media Really Does Work: A Case Study
Regular readers and our social media followers will be aware that Source took part in Shrewsbury’s Race For Life this month. Not only did we run the entire 5K (with some of us beating our personal bests), but we also managed to raise a staggering amount of money.
At the time of writing, the total stands at a whopping £1,057.50. We are so grateful to everyone who sponsored us. Your support made all the blood, sweat and tears completely worth it!
We Use Social Media, And You Should Too!
It has to be said, a fair amount of that sum is down to spreading the word on social media. I know – we are banging on again about how social media is such a powerful tool – but we’re only saying it because it’s true. We know that people out there are still fairly dubious about the whole topic. But let’s take the Race For Life event as an example and have a deeper look…
Regular updates on Source’s internal “goings-on” are posted via our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels. In preparation for the race and to spread the word about our involvement, we published a post entitled ‘Source Raising Money For Cancer Research UK In Race For Life’. We used this as an opportunity to link to our respective fundraising pages and asked for people to donate to a worthy cause.
The post was shared on our social media channels with a picture of smiling, happy faces, courtesy of Sally, Kirsty and Paula. Direct mentions of the official Race For Life and Cancer Research UK social media accounts (to ensure they would receive notifications about our post) and relevant hashtags were used to reach a larger audience. The engagement we achieved from these posts was as follows:
- 14 likes
- 1 share
- 801 people reached
- 2 retweets
- 3 likes
- 683 impressions
- 14 likes
- 1 comment
The post was published on our website and pushed out across social media on 18th May and, at the time of writing, it has generated a total of 68 pageviews, 51 of those being unique visits and 53 of them being from a social media channel. The average time spent on the page is over 5 minutes and the bounce rate is 82.98%. Whilst that may seem high at first, it is fairly respectable for a blog post, as people will often leave a website straight after they get the information they wanted from the post.
Following that success, and with a week to go before the big day, we decided to thank all our lovely clients that had already made a donation. So, on 7th June, we published a vibrant, eye-catching image, listing our clients together with a “Thank you” message. To accompany this, we tagged each of those clients accordingly, together with the official Race For Life and Cancer Research UK accounts. We also included relevant hashtags and a link back to our original blog post to make it easy for anyone still wishing to sponsor us. Once again, this post received a lot of engagement:
- 14 likes
- 3 shares
- 1,053 people reached
- 4 retweets
- 7 likes
- 1 comment
- 801 impressions
- 14 likes
Finally, the big day was upon us. The race was great fun and we loved being part of such an important event that brought together women from all over the county. And, of course, we were sure to take photos of our efforts, posting these images, once again, to our social media accounts. Using many of the same techniques as before, our sweaty-but-happy post-run faces generated:
- 37 likes
- 1 share
- 4 comments
- 1,604 people reached
- 4 retweets
- 7 likes
- 4 comments
- 669 impressions
- 8 likes
- 1 comment
Even now, a few days after posting, these numbers are still growing.
Incidentally, that one comment on our Instagram post was from the official Race for Life account saying “We love your pic! To be featured, please reply with #YESraceforlife to agree”. So, of course, we said yes!
In short, no, this activity is unlikely to lead to direct sales or conversions for us, but that was never our purpose. And to use social media successfully, it shouldn’t be yours either.
As well as our main goal of raising money for Cancer Research UK, we posted on social media to show the real, human faces of the people behind Source.
Whether your focus is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even more B2B-based platforms such as LinkedIn, the idea is to use social media as an additional marketing tool. It’s about awareness; getting your business out there and humanising your brand.
And hey, if you think you may need a little assistance getting yourself out there, we’re more than happy to help.
