RELO Roundtable…a gathering place

A relatively new online acquaintance asked if I'd notice a drop in visitor interest after Twitter announced it was ending it's three-year long relationship with Linkedin last month.

Apparently his company recently decided to kick the tires on using social media for business networking purposes and his boss was worried about the implications of the change.

Not being a heavy user, he was curious if the 'movers and shakers' in the industry were using some other platform to stay “connected”.

Prior to the breakup, tweets posted by LinkedIn members showed up as new Twitter updates if they had activated the API in their profile. Truncated links allowed them to be conveniently viewed by anyone with whom they were were connected on either the open or closed platform.

I really hadn't paid much attention to the site's traffic results until I got the note.

To me, though, it's sorta like comparing apples and oranges. Twitter is a primarily a micro-blogging platform that currently has over 500 million registered users worldwide. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a “professional” networking tool that has a much more modest 150 million members.

Twitter is open to anyone. In many cases, LinkedIn is only open to those you invite to connect with you.

A lot of LinkedIn users hunt down and pursue hundreds of 'well connected' industry insiders and then never do anything to consummate the relationship. Meanwhile, many of the most well recognized and influential 'decision makers' in the movin' business aren't even indexed at LinkedIn and don't have a clue on how to use Twitter or Facebook.

Currently many of the most popular LinkedIn groups that cater to the domestic moving and storage and international freight forwarding industries are closed to anyone but members approved and accepted by the network administrator. That practice, however, seems to be changing as many venues of like-minded professionals in LinkedIn Land are struggling to retain visitor interest.

Looking under the hood, the Google Analytics results showed RELO Roundtable had a 14.2% drop in referral traffic delivered from Linked since the falling out was announced at the end of June. The number of new Twitter followers increased by 16.1% for the same three-week long period – but none were part of my LinkedIn connections!

During the last 30 days, new visitor traffic to RELORT increased by 13.8% but the number of new RSS and email subscribers increased a net 15 percent. A few of those signing up for regular updates are professional pals on LinkedIn.

Can a correlation be drawn? I dunno, but I doubt it.  

I'm also not a heavy social media user.  On average, though, about 18-21% of RELORT's monthly referral traffic is delivered via one of social media platforms or blogging networks that this niche site uses to distribute new content. 

June and July are two of the busiest months in the moving business so I would naturally expect that many industry colleagues had their hands full during the last 30 days. Most could probably care less about social media networking changes like the Twitter/LinkedIn split that most probably didn't even know anything about.

One thing is for sure though!

Visitors interested in staying updated about the latest professional tips and tricks, or everyday trials and tribulations of local and long distance moving can always use any one of (or all) the social media platforms located in the right sidebar to get to the front door of RELO Roundtable. The popular email subscription feature and “Connect and Share” tools are displayed on all 500+ pages indexed at the site.

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