Today marks the official launch of the DailyTorygraph.com a site planned and built by Citizen Digital and populated by Dave Waters and Bertie Miller from The WaterMill London.
I've been aware of the Torygraph for quite some time now, it's existed previously as a Tumblr site, and has been running close to 2 years. In that time it's built up a small following of fans, but we felt that it hadn't reached it full potential, nor did it have the infrastructure to achieve this. Tumblr is a nice platform, but to push out into a bigger audience we felt it deserved a more sturdy, versatile infrastructure.
We decided to rebuild the site in Wordpress, and make full use of Facebook 'Commenting', 'Liking' and 'ADDTHIS' sharing facilities, and use data on these options to drive content from the site into key areas of the page to extend the visitors time on the site. From this data-stream we built a 'Most Shared this Week' and 'This Month' section and did the same with the tags to flush the first page with as much interesting content as possible.
Once we had the site built we then set-up the Social Media pages on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter site was especially interesting to do, as after a a bit of research we found the account of most of the Telegraph journalists and Photographers, and painstakingly went down the list and followed all of them. We did this for all the major newspapers, and the results were amazing, they loved the site, and retweeted the link, in fact this was such a success that it knocked our first server over and we had to quickly upgrade to a more robust option.
The site launched officially today with a redirect bringing in more traffic from the old Tumblr site and the figures have been outstanding. We've done close to 5K unique visitors this week, and they're staying on the site too, with 8k page impressions as they drill down into the content.
It's a great site, but as with any site, it's only as good as it's content. We were lucky to find a content stream this rich that was laying idly in the wilderness, just waiting to be reborn. The Watermill team deserve all the credit for diligently doing this every single day, and for having the foresight to listen to our proposal, and let us get on with the building of a platform that's going to generate great rewards for them, we've got some amazing ideas to push the concept further and are in talks about developing an iPhone/iPad app amongst other things.
If you want to talk to Citizen about Social Media marketing, or web design and build give us a call, or drop us an email.
Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk
Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk
Or call 07764 898 010
