The Day I Learned the Power of Social Media {Craft Your Blog}

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This story is not about this blog, it’s about one of my crafting sites, the knitting page at Craft Gossip. It’s basically a blog, where I write about what’s going on in the knitting world, share free patterns I like, occasionally do book reviews and have an almost-weekly giveaway of a knitting book or tool.

This month I’ve been doing a series on using your yarn stash (an important concern and common New Year’s resolution for knitters), and a yarn company happens to have just put out a collection of knitting patterns using small amounts of yarn.

They sent me a copy, and it’s adorable, and I wanted to do a giveaway since it fits in so well with what I’ve been talking about this month. They said yes, I posted the giveaway and sent them a link.

Now, usually a good giveaway will get about 100 or 200 entries. I think the last one I did had fewer than 50.

This one has been open for three days and already has almost 900 entries.

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One of these things is not like the others.

Why the big difference? The company shared the link on its Facebook page.

I have no way of knowing how many of the company’s more than 96,000 followers saw the message, but I know it got 320 likes and 27 comments on Facebook. I also know that nearly 4,500 referrers came from Facebook on the day the post went live (and the post itself had just over 4,000 page views), and nearly 900 the next day. (Of course I get referrers from Facebook all the time, so I’m not saying those all came from one link.)

Of course I could never get that kind of pull from my own network, but the point of being involved in social media is that I had that connection in place that could get it shared somewhere with a much bigger audience than I have on my own.

This is not to say that I shouldn’t — or you shouldn’t — spend time working on building your own networks and sharing with them, but it does mean you also need to spend time building relationships with other people, both those who might be able to help you and who you might be able to help.

And always tell companies when you’re reviewing their products or giving something of theirs away. It’s almost no effort for them to share and can reap you great rewards in the form of new visitors, some portion of whom will hopefully become regulars.

Do you have any stories about the awesome power of social media? I’d love to hear them!


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