For the first four days of the working week just gone I have spent some time away with a bunch of lads at a Centre Parcs being lairy, hungover and generally a bit daft in celebration of a mate’s 30th birthday. That meant although there were some posts that went live on this website, social media promotion of those posts was seriously lacking.

Usually, my pattern is to post links across five major social media platforms as soon as each post goes live, along with more general promotion during the following day. However, come that time in the evening this week one was half a dozen sheets to the wind. This lack of promotion had quite a telling impact on the traffic to this site over the past few days.

I love my charts, so here’s one to demonstrate the difference between four days of social media promotion the last week, versus the first four days of the working week just passed:

That’s a bit of a hefty drop isn’t it. During those four days I had off and links weren’t posted across social media as I normally do, all three major stat areas suffered, with the worst being in the page views department.

This isn’t a fluke. The same thing happens when I go on holiday. Traffic drops and page views suffer as a result.

A chart like this does demonstrate the importance of social media to online content platforms. By not posting to platforms like Twitter, Facebook and others, there’s a potential audience not seeing your links, your content, your images etc.

What the above tells us is two things. Firstly, that if you’re still not using social media to your advantage then you’re missing out big time. Secondly, if you start on social media but then let your campaigns slip, then it will damage your traffic. So if you’re going to start on social media, and you should be, then make sure that you’re going to do it consistently.

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