Blog Promotion & Google Analytics
Giulia LaForgia
My Approach
My approach to this assignment was to first log into SquareSpace and grab the link to my blog post. From here, I took the link and created two URL’s to track; one for email and one for LinkedIn. From here, the paths that these two links took diverged. Firstly, when it comes to email, I shared my trackable link to a handful of close family and friends. The link was accompanied by a brief personalized message making them all aware of the assignment and asking them to check out my post. Second, I went to LinkedIn to generate a post for my professional network. sharing my trackable link with my professional network on LinkedIn. The message was brief but professional, and I included three hashtags plus my trackable link in the post. My post garnered 27 reactions, 428 impressions, and 217 members reached (see below).
My Links:
Results
After two days passed, I took a look at my data. These results show that the link embedded in my LinkedIn post obtained more clicks than that through email. This was not surprising to me, as I only sent the email link to about fifteen people, only eleven of which actually opened it. From LinkedIn, nineteen users visited my link. My LinkedIn posts typically get a good amount of engagement, so it was in character for this post to perform the way it did. That being said, the average engagement time was higher through my email link, which also makes sense to me because my close friends and family are more likely to sit and actually look at my blog as opposed to my professional network.
What I Learned
This assignment taught me a lot about creating and tracking links and analytics. I learned some of the ins and outs of Google Analytics, which is a useful tool for someone considering going into social media marketing. If I were to do this assignment again, I would try to level the playing field between email and LinkedIn a bit more, emailing the trackable link to even more people. In addition to this, I would love to see how many clicks and visits my blog post would have gotten if I had posted/sent them a few days, or even weeks earlier. I think giving the links more time to live online would optimize the amount of clicks. I might also add more hashtags or even a more engaging photo/video as part of the LinkedIn post. Overall, this assignment gave me new skills I did not have before, and it was very helpful to me as a future marketer.