The Institute of Corrosion began its digital strategy implementation in February 2020. The primary objectives of this were to raise awareness of the ICorr Brand, both nationally and internationally, increase the social media presence, increase membership numbers, and increase the number of applicants booking onto training courses.
There is still lots of work to do, but the initial figures for the first 10 months of the campaign have been very encouraging.
On the social media front Linkedin was the main platform targeted due to its professional nature. The new Institute of Corrosion Linkedin page now has 4,446 followers and is gaining around 300 new followers every month which is very encouraging. Due to the quality of the content that we post on social media, and its regularity, we have a superb engagement rate (ER) of 4.78%. If you compare this to well established pages in the industry this is an excellent rate of engagement, NACE for example have an ER of 3.58% and The Society for Protective Coatings have an ER of 2.63%. Our other
social media channels include Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and all continue to have a steady growth in followers.
This increased presence on social media is having a positive impact on visitor numbers to the website. In 2020 we had 2343 referrals from social media, this is a 768% increase on 2019, which highlights the importance of a strong social media presence.
Overall visitor numbers to the website are also on the increase, 2020 saw 41,490 people visit the site which is a 10% increase on the previous year. This is a result of a number of factors including the increased social media presence and the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) work that has been ongoing during 2020.
The digital strategy working group have agreed that whilst these figures are very encouraging and have surpassed the initial expectations, they are only a very good starting point. We now want to focus on establishing how these increased visitor numbers convert into new members and attendees at training courses, and what we can do to improve this conversion.
We are also looking to increase the amount of video content available on the ICorr website and social media. With so many conferences, seminars and branch meetings being held online there has never been a better time to collate this content and share it with our members.
As members you can help by liking, sharing and engaging with the content that we put onto social media. We are always interested in potential new content so If there is anything that you would like to see more of please let us know via the usual channels, or a direct message on social media.
