Disclaimer:  Please do not try this at home.  We’d rather you learned from our test than actually make your brand go through this.

I wanted to share with you a little test that we did with a financial client of ours on Twitter.  As financial clients are typically pretty tight lipped, they asked that I not share their name in this post – but they did give me the ok to share my learnings.  I think a lot of you in the social space will enjoy this…

About a year ago, we set up a Twitter account for one of our clients – and the goal was really nothing more than extending their brand reach to consumers that might be getting into the social space.  There was no major sales initiative, and the basis of the content was simply tweeting out the contents & titles of their blogs whenever they posted it.  We outreached to active investors that were on the twitter universe already, and once we reached 1,000 followers, we essentially let it run itself.  Within no time, we had surpassed 1,500 followers and were being retweeted a number of times a day.  The client still had doubts as to what the value of this extend reach was – so we ran a little test for them.  We shut down their content and completely ignored their twitter account for months (don’t worry current clients – this was an approved plan – we won’t do this to you!).  When the client was satisfied that their twitter account was forgotten by the industry, we turned it back on…   Here is what happened after the first 2 weeks of going live with social media again (and keep in mind, there was no increase in external variables such as paid ads – so this is All Twitter):

• Traffic to their site from Twitter grew 443.75%.
• Overall Google Organic traffic  has grown 11.54%
• Overall Google Organic traffic from our clients brand name has grown 98.18%
• Overall Organic search traffic only grew 3.24% – amazingly enough – Bing dropped 66.25%!  All other search engines increased.
• Their “direct” traffic increased 7.74%
• Overall visits, pageviews, pages/visited, average time on site and bounce rate all improved.

The numbers so far have been staggering, and we’re going to keep this test going for a while longer so that it encompasses the same amount of time that they were inactive to the time it resumed…   But if it makes sense to you that their traffic to their site from Twitter would improve by over 400% – why in people’s right minds would they start a social media campaign and then not do anything with it…  Especially when you see the brand lift and all-in-all overall improvement on their analytics.