This is a guest post by San Sharma of Enterprise Nation, the home business website.
It used to be that the measure of a successful website was how many hits it had. But more recently, when people have asked, the question has felt intrusive, as if they were asking to see our medical records or our bank accounts!
These days, however, it’s about engagement – and not hits – that determines what makes a successful website. And it’s a measurement that’s far more transparent anyway. You can pretty much see for yourselves when a website has comments beneath its blog posts, activity in its forums, @replies or retweets on Twitter.
And that’s why, at Enterprise Nation, the home business website, we started #watercoolermoment. It’s a Twitter trend that happens every morning at 11am, when homeworkers across the UK gather to discuss topics ranging from last night’s TV, to family, to books and business. It’s a chance for our followers to recreate that feeling of ‘office buzz’ without any of the downsides of working in an office. You can always tune out, we say, if you’re too busy, which is where we think we have the edge!
How it works is we tell our followers to use the hashtag #watercoolermoment in their tweets between 11am and 12pm each day. We usually set a topic beforehand (apart from on ‘freestyle Fridays’!) and tune into Twitter’s live search results to see the responses. Our followers can too. So, what you get is a huge conversation taking place, linked together by the hashtag we came up with.
It’s a fantastic way for us to increase engagement with our followers and to raise awareness of our brand. Their followers might wonder what #watercoolermoment is, and if they click the term, they’ll see the conversation taking place and us leading it. More than that, it’s a fantastic way for our followers to get to know one another, to overcome the cabin fever of working from home and share ideas and experiences.
#watercoolermoment is only in its third week, but it’s already a huge success. We love getting involved! It’s great for us and it’s great for our followers. And it works because it achieves our goals and adds value for our followers.
Visit Enterprise Nation at http://www.enterprisenation.com and follow at http://twitter.com/e_nation.
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