When the phone rang last Sunday morning and I found myself shortly after heading clockwise eighty miles around the M25 to Little Dunmow a small rural village in Essex, I wasn’t thinking this will boost our recent charity efforts, but it would.
Sorry, a little background…I received a call last Sunday morning and long story short this led to spending the day KP’ing at Daniel Clifford’s The Flitch of Bacon. Full story here.
During a busy week it wasn’t until Thursday that I wrote it up, and then in the evening tweeted it and that’s when it all started.
Social media can very effectively amplify content and last Thursday evening was a case in point.
As readership is everything to media owners Google Analytics is one very useful piece of software allowing readership to be monitored twenty-four seven. So we have it on day and night seeing exactly how many readers we have on H&C News at any given time, and it was on when we tweeted our KP’ing adventure.
At around 10pm that Thursday evening we were seeing normal levels of readership for that time of night, circa ten to twenty ish, give or take roughly speaking. We tweeted and then three minutes later Daniel Clifford re tweeted, then it all started. Within minutes we had over a hundred readers on our KP’ing (love that term but not sure why) page, Daniel’s re tweet was then re tweeted and readership was building. Being a morning lark rather that a night owl I went to bed about midnight, at 5am Friday readership was again abnormally high and the page readers were reading was our KP’ing one.
So in two days 10pm Thurs – 10pm Sat seven hundred and thirty seven readers (love the precision of Google Analytics) have spent just under three minutes reading our KP’ing page through social media, Twitter and Facebook predominantly.
The KP’ing page (sorry if I am repeating the phrase too often) had a link that set out to partly explain my motivation to do a day of KP’ing (sorry). Note ‘a link singular’ always baffles me when the more the merrier approach is taken but that’s another story.
The link was to a page detailing a charity party we hosted to raise money helping at-risk children in Khayelisha Township, South Africa to learn and develop safely. Many of the readers clicked on the link and we then received two phone calls on Friday from companies offering to help next year’s charity party, thanks both.
So, one ever so simple little tweet amplified our readership and boosted a charity in a significant way. The key learning point for us once again is who is much more important than how many, as is what, although of course who and what does have a direct effect on how many. This will be the central to the discussion theme of our 2016 #H&C Social being held at Clerkenwell, London in September.