Case Study: One Of The Best Things We Did For Our Social Media Program This Year

The social media marketing program at Transparent Language is unusual because we offer language learning software for over 80 languages and our audience is massively segmented. Instead of pushing everyone into a single community, we’ve created over 30 separate community segments, each focused on a specific language. We have developed valuable content streams to share with these communities like:

• A Word of the Day service for 27 languages
• 30 Different language and culture blogs
• 30 Seperate YouTube channels

This approach is beneficial to language learners, because they get a focused experience; the shared content, news, and fellow community members are all focused on the same language of interest. It benefits us to be able to target our communications also.

However, managing that many segments is a challenge for a small social media team. We’ve done a good job with our own content, feeding useful items daily to each segment, but one of the rules of good social media is that you don’t always talk about you. We wanted to provide our communities with interesting and relevant curated content about the language they are studying, as well as cultural news and articles about the country where that language is spoken.

In the past, we would take an afternoon, and go through individual Google alerts and other sources, looking for relevant items to post to each community. This was time-consuming and therefore we were unable to do it consistently. I could only get to the top half-dozen segments of our community due to the time required. It was from doing this exercise manually that I was able to instantly recognize the value of what Bundle Post had to offer when they showed me the demo.

We implemented Bundle Post in February 2013. Here is what the typical results look like for user reach on our Facebook pages:

It’s worth mentioning that the reach prior to our Bundle Post case study was quite respectable; we had a good content strategy in place, however Bundle Post substantially changed our game in the following ways:

• We can now efficiently recycle our evergreen content back to our channels for an encore.
• We are able to pull in additional streams of our own content (vocabulary lists posted by our Byki List Central community) and incorporate those into our content stream; we hadn’t been able to do this efficiently in the past
• Instead of hunting through Google Alerts manually and scheduling a couple days of content sporadically, we now quickly identify quality content items for ALL of our communities, and consistently schedule out a week’s worth of content in one session – for ALL segments
• In addition to feeds, Bundle Post lets us create a collection of our best marketing content, web pages and resources to remind our community about

All of this begs the question, is the higher engagement beneficial? Our communities continue to grow by thousands every month, so obviously higher visibility helps with that, but I wanted to look a little deeper than the raw follower counts. Like, say, web traffic.

We’ve seen a 65% increase in traffic to our website from Facebook since we started using Bundle Post. Even more impressive is the 263% increase in traffic results coming from Twitter.

Content posted to Twitter has a much shorter lifecycle than Facebook content. Our 1 – 2 content posts/day were fairly effective for the relatively slower-moving Facebook content stream, but Twitter gobbled those up much faster and it just wasn’t enough. Bundle Post allowed us to step up the Twitter volume in a way we just couldn’t do manually, and the fact that it lets us create separate schedule templates for the different frequency needs of these two platforms clearly pays off.

The Bottom line:

Signing up for Bundle Post was one of the best things we did for our social media program this year. So many social media strategies and tools are hard to attribute tangible results to, but this one has been a clear and dramatic benefit to our program.

This was an unsolicited case study and guest post by:

Lorien Green @LorienGreen
Lorien is the Inbound Marketing Manager for Transparent Language, Inc., a language software company with a combined social following of over three million. In her spare time, she makes indie documentaries and obsesses about the pinball resurgence.

*If Bundle Post can impact the results of a business that has such a highly complex and fragmented target audience, imagine what it can do for your market. Get your free trial now.