It’s been a few months since we implemented the first phase of our User Generated Content strategy. I thought this would be a good time to share some results.

Since we integrated HelloBCBlogs.com into our HelloBC.com website in March, we’ve seen a rapid increase in traffic to our blog entries. In July, we received almost 200,000 blog pageviews. The blog entries help us in our SEO efforts; 5% of our organic Search Engine traffic lands on a blog entry. We also have over 1,000 subscribers to our RSS feed.

The entries from travelers is showing a steady climb and we’re approaching the 300 mark. We were aiming for quality first; tips and information people can do something with. All entries are tagged with a community and an activity. This allows us to present relevant blog content alongside our official information. Between our staff, visitor centres and traveler entries, we cover almost 100 communities in BC and over 80 activities so far, for a total of 350 community/destination combinations. That makes for a great diversity of content, so it’s working out very well.

From a User Experience perspective, the blogs are fantastic. The average pageviews for a blog visitor is 4 times that of an average visitor. Qualitative research conducted in some key markets proved that our unique strategy to position blog entries alongside our official information on the same page is working beautifully. It adds a layer of credibility and insider information consumers really appreciate. Our traffic patterns confirm this as well, many visitors will move back and forth between official information and blogs.

We see room for improvement. We’d like to see more consumer interaction with our blogs for example. People don’t leave many comments, but a fair number of people rate the entries. We have some ideas to further evolve the blogs with the goal to grow it into an online community. I’ll share some more details when I can in the future.

See also my previous post about our User Generated Content strategy.