Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl: December 2015

Mid-year I created a Twitter account (@SerenaHsiOS, ~700 followers) to push out elearning links since it didn't seem like the right venue to push them out my food-themed Twitter account (@nwfood). There are two stats from the Bitly dashboard that I find most curious. The first is the country domain referrer and the second is how users find my tweet--and only 15% them find it through Twitter.

Like most people, I just use Bitly as a link shortener. I know it has link stats and that once you create a bitlink, it can never be deleted (maybe archived these days). And with a mobile device and social sharing permissions, I can use Bitly to push out links to either Twitter account through Bitly with no extra logins required. I can even format the layout of the tweet.

This to me is very strange, considering that I only broadcast business and elearning story links through non-food Twitter account. Let's tackle country referrer first. Here is the last 30-ish days from my Bitly dashboard:

2015-12 Last 30 Days - Bitlinks on @SerenaHsiOS - Country Domain

What in the world?? Why is engagement so high from Germany if my primary follower audience is US-based? I have no answer for this just yet.

The next dashboard shows me how a user got to my feed:

2015-12 Last 30 Days - Bitlinks on @SerenaHsiOS - Refer Type

Even more puzzling is the grouping for the first bucket. What makes me concerned about the validity of this data is that when I look at the list for my top tweets, according to the Bitly dashboard, no tweet has received more than 5 likes. And, on top of that.. how do you suppose impressions are calculated? I would have expected the top two stats to be reversed. How are my tweets being picked up if not through Twitter itself?

2015-12 Twitter Dashboard @SerenaHsiOS

Between Bitly and Twitter, my social analytics dashboards make no sense -- because my followers/following is so small (fewer than 1k each).

Serena Y. Hsi, MBA

Welcome to my ramblings about marketing techniques, insights, business models, and perspectives on what companies do to bring products and services to market. My marketing work encompasses corporate and agency marketing handling many aspects within the marketing discipline: competitive intelligence, market strategy, market research, consulting, customer segmentation, database marketing, and identifying better customer acquisition methods and cross-sell opportunities.

The strength of a company's product or services should be as strong as its business strategy and marketing insight into its own industry. My passions are marketing and technology, which just happens to also be my career path.

Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl

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