Introducing KBucket, a topic curation solution that will significantly increase your social inbound traffic and cost you much less than PPC advertising. After your initial cost to license the program you will continue to generate organic traffic through minimal effort. The findings in this post are based on actual results going back 5 months.
Our studies will measure the social ROI in six important categories:
The results shared in this post are analytics from links shared from our own curated library under the “KBucket Page“. To put our results in perspective I am also comparing them with a Facebook ad campaign, as well as analytics generated from a Twitter lead generation solution called “Market Hub”.
We started scheduling curated articles for distribution from our KBucket page starting in July of 2016 and increased the number of shared articles on December 16t,h as you will see in the charts below. Here is what has happened so far:
At first glance the results are truly unbelievable. We shared 772 messages and received 1185 clicks. That is a 153% CTR which is phenomenal by any standard. The inbound traffic generated is consistent and predicated on both the number of articles shared and the number of followers on your social channels. We currently have about 5000 followers on Twitter, over 500 connections on LinkedIn and Facebook post reach has been a mere 555 in the last month.
Let’s now compare the KBucket results with a Facebook ad campaign and the results generated by “Market Hub”.
For the Facebook we marketed a landing page to promote our browser extension and a blog post to promote our curation solution to journalist. My intent here is not to say that curation will replace advertising, since advertising has a much wider reach than curation. My intent is to show the cost of advertising and the effectiveness of the KBucket solution.,
MarketHub is a twitter lead generation platform. This solution is a more direct competitor to our KBucket solution. However “MarketHub” doesn’t directly drive traffic to your site, they simply ad a “Click to Action” banner at the bottom of every link they share and the banners drive traffic. The industry average performance for successful banner ads is between 1-2%. Below I have entered my Google analytics results for inbound links from Twitter. I am attributing 60% of those links to “MarketHub”, since I don’t have access to my dashboard anymore after I cancelled my account.
| Vendor |
Campaign |
Duration |
Inbound links |
CPC |
Total Cost |
| Facebook |
Pay Per Click |
20 days |
292 |
$1.06 |
$306 |
| Market Hub |
Subscription |
3 months |
66 |
$4.50 |
$297 |
| KBucket |
One Time Fee |
6 months |
1185 |
$1.26 |
$1,500 |
Note: We average 1.7 clicks per message shared. Sharing 1000 messages will generate 1700 link. Calculating the cost of licensing annually, you will be paying 7 cents a click. That is more cost effective than any solution on the market today.
In practice, we know that not all clicks result in visits to your site, which is the metric we seek. A good portion of clicks generally don’t convert because they were either generated by a bot, or the user decided to abort the visit because the page wouldn’t load fast enough, or for some other reason. So in practice your real Cost Per Click (CPC) is higher than what the vendor reports.
We are obviously interested in measuring the real Cost Per Click (CPC). So let’s take a look at the visits generated to our website from our curation efforts. Notice that our efforts were spread across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. I am using Google Analytics to report this data as the HubSpot data only measures visits to my blog page. Most of the links shared are to the KBucket page that is not included in my Hubspot analytics.
This is a total of 848 visits from Social media. This is less than the total number of clicks reported by Hubspot (1185) but still a 117% CTR. Following are the total clicks I received to my Hubspot blog page which is the mix of links shared promoting our own content.
With KBucket you pay for the platform once with no recurring costs. So the longer you own the KBucket platform the more cost effective it gets.
Why does KBucket perform so well!
To examine the answer let’s review the process first. We subscribe to various influencer news letters, We also have set up aggregation services like Drumup and Nuzzel to deliver the most popular articles on topics of our interest. Additionally, we read trade magazines and curate links that provide solutions to my business problems. For example if you read readit or stumbledupon you can track which articles are trending well.
This implies that the curated content in ourchannels are already ranked high in popularity and in search engines. No wonder they perform so well! Influencers research their headlines and write articles people want to read; that’s why they are influencers. Their content naturally performs better.
So, as a curator you should pay close attention to your selected articles. Make sure your curated library covers a broad range and you are not repeating the same angle from multiple authors. Just pick the one that resonate best with you. Your followers should know you are taking time to get them the best information possible.
Your work never gets old – Curating ever-green links!
We have been curating for over 6 years now, and have found that many great insights and articles are as useful today as they were when they were first published. In some cases where the world has moved on and the advice or report is out of date, you can still provide value by pointing out how the world has moved on. For example we have been creating lists of products and some date back to 5 or 6 years ago, and naturally a number of them are no longer around. That in itself is an interesting piece of information, don’t you agree? A list of companies that went out of business, and then investigate and comment why!
If you curate 3 links a day, 15 days a month, you will have over 780 links in your curated library in just one year. Little drops of water make a mighty ocean. Stay disciplined, record your insights as they occur and soon you will have an incredible resource that will drive your inbound traffic and establish you as a thought leader in your field!
KBucket makes this all easy!
KBucket makes it easy to host hundreds of links on one page and make them all accessible, Each page is divided into multiple groups and each group offers one or more channels. Each channel lists a number of links, that can be quickly navigated with category, publisher and author tags. In other words the library of links is accessible for anyone to discover incredible content.
Each link in the library can be shared individually to drive traffic back to your website. As a marketer it is both important to stay visible and fresh, because freshness and variety is what will give you authority and elevate your status in social media. Links can also be re-shared in time intervals. With a library of hundreds of links, your timeline will always look interesting and informative.
Additionally, scheduling links is also easy. If your scheduler let’s you upload RSS feeds, you can simply queue your entire library to run in intervals, delivering great content. If your scheduler requires you to enter links manually (Hubspot works this way), then you can also easily filter and pick the links you want from your library.
In addition to getting highly targeted traffic to your site, KBucket will also help you grow your follower reach. In social media people follow others because of what they share! We found that the quality of followers is also better targeted to the people we want to reach.
Each shared link adds the author’s Twitter handle to your message. This will let the author know you are sharing their content. As a result, you will now have an opportunity to connect with those influencers, as you have now separated yourself from the crowd.
Some of our own tweets are directly to the author of the article, letting them know how well their links are performing in our channel. Reciprocity is a powerful driver of building influence and getting noticed!
CONCLUSION:
KBucket is a powerful curation solution for generating inbound traffic by curating and sharing links related to your business. The benefits can be summarized as follows
- You own you assets. What you curate lives on your platform and will continue to pay dividends
- There is only a one time fee for installtion and training.
- Links that you curate drive traffic back to your site
- You can use your curated library as a resource for all employees to share content (employee advocacy)
- Your curated content can provide answers to business problems, to be used by your sales department
- KBucket is more cost efficient than PPC for driving inbound traffic
- KBucket shares will increase your reach on all social networks
- KBucket helps your SEO
- KBucket is a excellent way to get backlinks to your site.
We welcome both site owners and digital agencies who help their clients with their social media strategy. Signup for a demo, download KBrowser and amplify your social media strategy.
