We are often asked: Is a social media presence important for companies in the civil, environmental and construction fields? We like to respond to these type of questions with numbers. Once we have reliable numbers, we can make decisions on the importance of allocating resources on a certain initiative. Argo-E is currently maintaining about 15 websites in the broad civil, environmental and construction industry. So we dug into the analytics of all these websites for the year 2015 and here is what we found:

• The key social media is Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. On average, for all the CEE websites we are handling, 40.3% of social media traffic is coming from Facebook, and about the same traffic, 37.3%, is coming from LinkedIn. 25.7% is coming from Twitter and the remaining very small percentage is coming from other social media (e.g. Reditt).
• On average, the website traffic that is coming from all social media is about 3% of the total traffic.
• Spending time on social media does seem to make a difference. We divided the websites in our study, between websites with active social media presence and websites without active social media presence. Inactive social media presence websites are those that either do not have a social media account, or nobody seems to post anything on the account during the study period. Active social media presence includes websites that someone is regularly (but not necessarily often) posting updates. Note that none of the websites we included in the analyses is promoted with a paid promotion through social media. So let’s look at the results: We observed a significant difference in the percentage of traffic between these two groups. Websites with active social media presence have on average 5.7% of traffic originating from social media. On the other hand, websites without active social media presence have on average 0.55% of traffic coming from social media. Thus, there is an order of magnitude difference in traffic between websites that are active on social media and websites that are not.

In conclusion, there is no question that social media does increase your website traffic. Whether it is worthwhile to spend resources on this is a decision you have to make. This calculation may help you: Find your total website traffic. Would a 5% increase in your website traffic be worthwhile to you? If so, you may want to consider becoming active through social media.