A contest, or my own little social experiment? - Reflections on the link that helped make me a winner.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 8:23PM If for some reason you didn't know, I was in a contest that ended the other day (in my favour). The official announcement hasn't even been made yet. This is about the single link that helped me make it to the top of the leaderboard.
I actually decided on the day the contest started that this could be a pretty interesting social experiment (and that way, even if I lost, I would still have something to talk about). So, bit.ly/voteforluke is now the most clicked link I've ever posted, and I now have some interesting facts about it that I think are pretty cool to share. The link's been shared using traditional forms of media (newspaper, radio, and I also include email) as well as new forms (Facebook, Twitter). So, what was the result? That little link was clicked a total of 5,586 times over 28 days. That's 199.5 times per day. Just note - if someone went to the YPG page itself, it wouldn't have been included in that number, so really the page could've been visited many more times. This look at the numbers isn't anything overly analyzed for now, but I thought I'd share it with you anyways.
- Out of the 5,586 clicks, 3,335 of them were from Canada, 1318 were from the US, 147 from the UK, 115 from Germany, 47 from Australia, 25 from France, 21 from Turkey, 22 from the Netherlands, 14 from Spain, 9 from Egypt, 9 from Russia, 9 from Brazil, 9 from Ireland, 8 from Mexico and then 498 from other countries (many many many countries). Pretty cool, huh? I guess it pays to have from friends around the world. You're probably able to tell which ones you invited to vote as well.
The Locations (just right click and open in a new window to see it clearly):

- So, how did people hear about the link? 2,220 came directly to the site, either via Email or typing it into their browser after hearing it on the radio or reading it in a newspaper, 2128 clicks came from Facebook, and 695 came from Twitter. The next closest was an interesting place, TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop application. It surprised me at how many clicks came from only this app! The rest came from a huge variety of other places. Forums, websites, blog posts, Google, etc.
- The most clicks came in on February 28th, with 1,719 and the 27th, with 699 clicks. You can see the graph below for yourself. Lulls came in the middle of the month, which makes sense considering not a whole lot of promoting was done during this time.
The Timeline (right click and open in new window to see it more clearly):

- Facebook is pretty interesting to look at as well. If you posted the link to your Facebook status, I can see exactly how many people clicked it from your profile. There were literally hundreds of people that posted the link in their statuses. Most people don't visit profiles to click the links though - they just click on the home page, so many people that posted it in their status may not appear on the summary. This is important, because it shows that people don't really pay a whole lot of attention to a person's personal profile. I suppose when friends visit Facebook, they see what's on the News Feed, then head to what they actually came to Facebook to do.
- The hardest data to track is when people typed in the link themselves. I was on total of 3 radio stations (more than once each time) as well as in 4 newspapers. None of these were paid advertising so comparing it to an ad in a newspaper is difficult to do.
- Bit.ly also gives you access to which Twitter accounts tweeted about the link. Unfortunately bit.ly doesn't go back all the way to February 1st, so I don't know how many times it was Tweeted, but it was around 50 times a week.
So, what does it mean? Well, in my case, social media clearly had the edge in my winning this contest, but only by about 100 clicks. That being said, the difference between traditional media 'clicks' and social media 'clicks' is almost too small to compare.
Bottom line: I definitely needed both to win this contest. Neither one alone would've won me a darn thing, so thank goodness I know how to use both.
See, interesting things can come of something that was supposed to only be the 'vessel' to the contest.
-Luke
Ps - if you want to see the data in it's full glory - you can have a look at all the stats here: bit.ly/info/bH2tmR It keeps going up, by pretty big numbers even though it ended!
Luke |
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