I’m excited to share a Storify explaining the social
strategy, daily execution and overall performance of my blog – Kristen the PR
Girl. The web page can be accessed HERE.
I feel that I’ve taken a very honest approach to the success
of my blog over the last month or so, and look forward to your feedback. Here
are a few outstanding items I’d love your feedback on:
·
What are your thoughts on my strategy? Are there
any areas I missed, should expand upon, etc.?
·
Do you think the activity section was easy to
follow?
·
What are your thoughts on Yandex.ru being a key
traffic driver to the blog site? It looks like most other classmates had the
same result. Also, very few of us saw Twitter and Pinterest as a key driver to our blogs. Why do you think that is?
Thanks in advance for your feedback and I look forward to
hearing from you.
Kristen
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UPDATED
My updated Storify per classmate feedback can be found HERE. Thanks for all of your initial input and please let me know if you have any final thoughts!
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UPDATED
My updated Storify per classmate feedback can be found HERE. Thanks for all of your initial input and please let me know if you have any final thoughts!
Hi Kristen,
ReplyDeleteYour Storify looks like it just about done - looks great. For your Intro section, I would take the first paragraph and shorten it, or build into your Background.
Under your Strategy section, I like the points you re-capped, but may need to format them a little differently so that they don't appear as long. It's hard on the eyes as you read through them, but I think they are important points to feature.
Your Activity section looks really good - I may need some tips on how you got the images to copy over so nicely. It's very clean and detailed.
Great job!
Tara
Hi Tara - Thanks for the great feedback.
DeleteWe're required to have both an Intro and a Background section, so perhaps I'll just build out the Intro section a little bit more. What do you think?
Thanks for your suggestion on the strategy section. I'll see if I can add in some visuals to break it up.
Happy to help with the activity section! Storify is tricky at first, but it looks really good once you get the hang of it. I had to upload some images to Flickr to use them which took some time but worked well.
Any thoughts on Yandex.ru as a key traffic driver? Did you see it in your results as well?
Kristen
Hey Kristen, great job with your Storify! I also noticed that Yandex was a key driver to my blog. It looks like it's a Russia search engine site, but I can't find an explanation for why it's driving so much traffic to my blog. I was disappointed that I haven't received much traffic from Twitter & Linkedin, but I think it's definitely a great tool to let people know your blog is up. I have a few blogs bookmarked, so I tend to go right to the page as opposed to clicking on a blog from our social media sites. Maybe others do the same?
ReplyDeleteI really liked your detailed strategy section, but it was a little hard to reach as Tara mentioned above. I would consider bolding the subheads (Commitment, Mobile, etc) and adding a line break between each title and the copy.
I like the use of images in your activity section. One thing I noticed was in under Blog Post #3 you mentioned that you started to use hashtags, and I can see that you added a few for the tweet promoting the 4th blog post. Just something to consider for the future, you might want to use tags that are related to the post like #socialmedia or #socialmediaprivacy. #Blog might be a little vague.
Overall, your Storify page looks great!
-Amanda
Hi Amanda -
DeleteI was also disappointed to see that social media sites like Twitter and Pinterest were not key drivers to my blog. I think it takes a great deal of time to develop a robust social strategy, so it would probably be difficult to hit this margin in an eight week span. I included this as a bullet point in my "need to work on" section.
Thanks for your suggestions on the strategy section. I'll definately be making those changes.
Thanks for your suggestion on more relevant hashtags. I must have left a word out of #blog because I agree it's much too vague.
Do you think there's anything more I can do to paint a picture of how I applied classmate and professor feedback to evolve my blog? I think I did a pretty good job of acknowlodging weak areas and making changes accordingly. What do you think?
Kristen
Hi Kristen and Amanda,
DeleteI have no proof to back this, but I do think one of the reasons we didn't see Pinterest or Twitter as a traffic-driver to our blogs is because we
1. Weren't using them to discover the links. The first time around, I went to the class wiki. After that, links were bookmarked in my browser. I rarely turned to Twitter and Pinterest to discover classmate posts.
2. Because we created accounts for the purpose of this class, we are still building personal brands and might not have big followings. Yes, hashtags and mentions help, but I would have gotten a lot more traffic if I had used my personal account, which has more than 10x the amount of followers that my class one has.
Just some food for thought! I think in a class with more time (an extra eight weeks, for example), we would potentially see the Twitter and Pinterest traffic rise as we continued to build our brands.
Kait
Hey Kristin, I know that Mark touched on using SEO to help drive traffic to our site. You might want to mention tactics around using tagging or hyperlinking specific keywords in your blog to increase the visits to your page.
DeleteKate - I think you make a great first point. I also visited classmates blogs through saved bookmarks and click throughs from my blog. I very rarely clicked and commented on a blog from Twitter or Pinterest. I also agree that if we were to tap our already existing followers from our personal network we would have seen greater results as well.
DeleteHi Kristen,
ReplyDeleteGreat Storify paper so far! VERY interesting about the Russian search engine. This did not show up on my referring sites list for my blog so I'm very intrigued. Do you think it could possibly be a site we all use but showing up under a different name? In my referring sites, I had t.co as one, and didn't realize it was twitter until I clicked the hyperlink. I like how you discussed each blog throughout the course and shared links. This way we can go back and reference your progress.
So far, I think your Storify paper is on the right track and you definitely have successfully incorporated enough images. It's unique how you put your own personal twist on your accounts for this course and shared them with your family and friends. One thing I would suggest, is if you used it, talk about the class Facebook group and if its impacted your posts in any way. Great work!
Nicole
Hi Nicole - Thanks for the encouraging feedback! Yes, I was super intrigued by the Russian search engine. I also noticed that Russia scored highly for many classmates in their audience numbers. I'm wondering if there's any connection there. Thanks again for your feedback!
DeleteHi Kirsten, I think you are on the right path and our classmates offered some good advice. I also was disappointed in my Twitter and Pinterest results.
ReplyDeleteI would expand on the Audience section some more. Maybe you should break up the Strategy section into mini paragraphs, it was a little difficult for me to read.
Thanks for your feedback, Andrea! It sounds like a lot of people feel that my strategy section is too heavy so I appreciate the feedback and will definitely adjust accordingly. Best of luck finalizing your own Storify!
DeleteHi Kristen,
ReplyDeleteI think your Storify is looking great!
Within your Strategy, you may be able to incorporate a few images of specific blog posts, such as your Super Bowl post by using the screen shot.
With the Olympics being in Russia, perhaps athletes searching for the Super Bowl, or other topics related to your blog may have created traffic from the Russian search engine. Just a thought. If this makes sense, you could use that example as a way that your creative content was successful in gaining readers internationally by using current events and incorporating them into your blog. This would really show the full extent of how your strategy succeeded on a global scale.
Great Storify!
Dawn
Hi Dawn - I hadn't considered the Olympics having an impact on the Russian search engine as relates to my blog but it's an interesting point. I'll be sure to look into it. Thanks for the tip!
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHey Kristen,
ReplyDeleteYour Storify looks great. It is incredibly well organized and very detailed. I think your Strategy is great but I would echo what some people said above and try to break up the texts somehow. I don’t know what related imagery you could put but definitely bold, italicized headings and spacing them out is definitely a good idea.
Your Activity section was very clear cut and straight forward. It gave a good rundown of what you accomplished, what you needed to work on, and really illustrated nicely your growing social media presence. I was just wondering if you tweeted and pinned only once per week. If you did, maybe you should mention that you could have tweeted or pinned more. If you did tweet and pin more than once, you could maybe put examples of that and when you would tweet and pin. Would you do it strategically in the day or week or just whenever you could? How would you improve this system in the future?
I also agree with Tara that you can probably split off some part of your Introduction into the Background section, especially a large chunk, if not all, of the first paragraph.
That is interesting you saw Yandex.ru as a major traffic source. I wonder if it might be a bot like Prof Van Dyke mentioned in his message today. In either case, I have seen some international traffic as well, mostly from Germany and a bit from Japan, Australia, and a few other places.
I think I did see quite a bit of traffic from Twitter and Pinterest for my blog, and Google as well. I’m not sure how that came about but a possibility is that I did make sure to tweet and pin as much as possible throughout the week about my blog. I basically made it a goal to consistently plug my blog while breaking it up with retweeted content that gave my social media presence a bit of personality. Maybe you could possibly mention some other ways you used Twitter and Pinterest throughout this course, outside of promoting your blog that may have also raised your social presence and reputation.
Hope that was helpful. This was great work and a very enjoyable read. I liked how honest you were about where you could improve your blog and social media performance. Good luck on your final draft!
Hi Nash - Thanks for the great feedback! I absolutely should have done more tweeting and pinning throughout the week to further promote my blog. That's a good pointer and I'll be sure to include it. Thanks, and good luck with finalizing your Storify as well.
DeleteKristen,
ReplyDeleteI liked that you divided your strategy section up into different parts. It made it very easy to understand what your goals were and how you planned on getting there. You mentioned that your success in getting followers each week was because of your different take on the assignments. That would be a good place in your store to insert a link to a specific post as an example of this. You also did a good job of breaking down each post and describing it. As far as your analysis goes, I found it interesting that twitter and pinterest did not come out on top in terms of referrals to your site. Are there any strategies you would have changed to try to gain more referrals from these platforms? Your conclusion was one of my favorite parts of this post. You broke it down into things that worked well and things that needed to be worked on.
Great Post!
Hi Ian,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your positive feedback. Since creating my Storify last Monday, my referring sites and URLs have changed based on new posts, and Twitter is now the 6th highest traffic driver to my site. I think Kate makes so great points above about why many of us did not see big results from Twitter and Pinterest based on the course assignments and the limited amount of time we had to build a social presence on these new platforms. Looking back, I would have used more relevant hash tags to the posted content, but I'm not sure how much that would have actually moved the needle in driving unique visitors to my page.
Thanks for the feedback!