This is part three of a multi-article series. Click here to read the first article about Terminal Goals and Results, and second article about Enabling Goal 1.
In the previous article, I talked about my terminal goal for 2024 and enabling goal #1:
Terminal Goal — Increase show audience to 10% of game-day attendance
Enabling Goal 1 — Increase fan-base awareness
Enabling Goal 2 — Increase Social Media click-through
Enabling Goal 3 — Increase Instagram engagement
In this article I’ll talk about Enabling Goal 2 and how I planned to get there.
Going into 2023 our main social media platforms were Facebook and Twitter/X, with some dabbling on Instagram. The enabling goal here was to leverage social media to drive people to our website for written articles and by extension get them hooked on the show (whether they watch live or recorded).
The goal was to have daily, eye-catching content that increased our social media followers, and by just numbers get more people to read our written work and convert them into live-show viewers. After some coaching from my niece, I landed on three main tasks
Leverage Meta’s business suite to schedule posts across their platforms
(Initially) Leverage Twittex’s business tools to schedule posts
Leverage Streamyard’s editing tools to generate clips of the live show and distribute across all our platforms
The biggest thing here was pushing out content when people were going to physically see it and get into the algorithm’s good graces. Scheduling posts daily, for several days in a row, would keep us at a constant low boil to bring up the level of engagement and click-through to the website and the show. My approach was to massively increase our following on Instagram and boost our content on Twittex.
Content Tools
To increase click through I needed to use some content tools:
Link shortener for character-restricted platforms
Auto-responder for Instagram
To get people to click through links I wanted to maximize the character space and offer links better. Getting link tracking was a bonus. After a little research, I started using dub.co link shortener, which was free, easy to use, and had limited metrics. Tracking the click-through was particularly important when analytics were shut off on Twittex for non-verified accounts. Initially I was hoping I could use the short-links on our other platforms, even generate multiple short-URLs for the same content so I could really see how many clicks we were getting from each platform. But I soon found out, a few platforms either restrict short-links, or they tunnel through it and display just the end-destination URL. This might have been Social Media Marketing 101, but again, this isn’t my job so I’m learning as I go.
Our other main platform to grow was Instagram, and since I can’t post links there easily, I again did a little research. I started using Manychat to get some automated response scripts running and serve people a link to get to articles instead of counting on them going to the website on their own, or navigating to the account profile and finding the ‘link in bio.’
In my experience with our follower base, Manychat did not increase traffic or engagement. At all. Zero. I created three automated response scripts and updated the destination URL each week, you might’ve seen the “DM for link to the article” on Instagram. I ran those three scripts for 15 weeks and got exactly 2 DMs. I could’ve paid money to be able to have Comment <keyword> for link in your inbox” or whatever it can do, but for us, $15/month doesn’t make sense unless we were selling something and could see an increase in sales or something.
Twittex
If you’ve been paying attention to that bird platform at all, you know there’s been a lot of upheaval, particularly within the small-creator-space, which is like 99% of content creators for USL. I originally could schedule posts on Twittex and view analytics, but when The Change happened there, those tools were taken away. We couldn’t schedule, we couldn’t see analytics, we couldn’t livestream any more, and our referrals from the platform fell off a cliff.
I’ve posted about it before, but our click through from that platform cratered during the summer and hasn’t recovered. While we were averaging 30-50 clicks for each article from Twittex to our website, we were only seeing 12-15 when they changed their algorithm.
Eventually, most of USL independent content creators regrouped on Bluesky, which we also joined and continue to cross-post on Twittex, but as of this writing our engagement on either platform has not recovered.
I thought I had a pretty simple formula here: get more followers, by sheer percentages more followers means more people will click links to articles, and turn into regular listeners of the show. To accomplish this I used one of those “DM for link” services. It was an automated service (free version) that let you set up the prompts and allegedly turbo charge your click-through.
My tip here is: don’t think automation will solve all your problems— our followers are much more likely to find the link in bio, or just go to the website themselves. A vast majority of our website traffic comes from people going directly there.
On the flip side, when Twittex killed live streaming for us, we switched to live streaming to Instagram and picked up another 30-40 views each week.
Results
This year was tough for everyone on social media, not just us. Engagement rates are way down across every platform. For us, we took a 10-15% hit to almost every metric.
Part of our reduction was we had slightly less weekly content created, and Tyler wrote some really great articles last year about the OCSC 10-year stadium deal, and unfortunately, an article about San Diego Loyal folding. Tyler’s two articles were good for almost 600 visits on their own, but the number of people reading our regular weekly preview and recap articles stayed mostly flat, averaging about 35 reads each every week. The good news is our bounce rate is lower, which means people are coming to the site and visiting more than one page.
After some more analysis, what it seems like is we’re getting people initially through or main social media channels, but then they start coming to the site from a bookmark or typing in the site address directly.
I have some theories on what’s happening here, but no way to really track it down. That said, we’ll continue to blast our message across social media channels as our main source of keeping connected with fans of the team and the show. If we could secure some type of funding we’ll start doing some strategic promotion of our posts to get our message on people’s phones instead of letting the algorithm brutalize us.
Check out the next article about Enabling Goal #3.
