AGORACOM Small-cap Investor Relations Blog

Good morning to you all.  As you know, I love to share AGORACOM Traffic data and today I’ve pulled out our average annual traffic metrics for the years 2008 – 2010, representing our first 3 full years of operating a full-blown community for the small-cap industry.  Suffice it to say, we are extremely proud of the results, which all started with this mission to smash the status quo by launching “Investor Controlled” stock discussion forums back in October of 2007.

As always, please find enclosed a Google Analytics snapshot that details the period:

TRAFFIC DATA SNAPSHOT COMING SHORTLY

THE TALE OF THE TAPE

(Figures for January 1, 2008 – December 31, 2010. All figures reported by Google Analytics)

• Unique Visitors 3,323,264
• Visits 22,200,293
• Page Views 224,097,193
• Pages Per Visit 10.09
• Avg Time On Site 8:26
• Traffic Sources  55.65% Direct;  27.03% Search Engines; 16.15% Referring Sites
• Number Of Countries/Territories 223
• Top 10 (Canada, USA, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Norway)

The numbers look even better when you consider

• We built our model on quality vs quantity. As such, this is pure discussion. No spam, flaming and bickering traffic.
• We are only focusing on small-cap and mid-cap stocks …for now.

The continued strength in our traffic can be attributed to the following reasons.

1. Social Media

We have really turned on our social media efforts in 2010, which have resulted in:

• Twitter:  A focus on great content has helped us generate 1,460 followers on our main AGORACOM Twitter Account.  This is especially impressive when you consider the fact we have a 3.93:1 ratio of following:followers.  In English, that means we’ve earned our followers, as opposed to simply racking up high totals by reciprocal follows.

• In addition, we’ve also created successful Twitter accounts for our following content channels: @AOL Small Cap Show (196 followers); @SmallCapTV (332 followers); @SmallCapCEOshow (87 followers); @TopSmallCapNews (158 Followers)

• Online Videos:  We recently announced our online video views surpassed 300,000 owing to the fact our initiative is in full gear with 3 channels now delivering laser targeted daily videos to multiple video sites. I don’t think any other small-cap investor relations firm can match the following: Main AGORACOM Show (1,006 videos); AGORACOM Small Cap Gold and Resources TV (236 videos); Chinese Small Cap TV (254 videos).

• Our Facebook Fan Page now has over 475 Fans thanks to the great content (video, blog posts, tweets) we are feeding into it on a daily basis

SOCIAL MEDIA IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT TRAFFIC

Furthermore, we’ve worked hard at cross-promoting our social media channels AND providing a variety of content on each. If you’re a small-cap company that is simply creating Twitter and Facebook accounts to post press releases, you are simply wasting your time (Beware Of ….  The Rise Of Social Media IR “Experts” a.k.a Pretenders)

Cross-promote and differentiate so that investors have options to consume what is most important to them.  Otherwise, investors simply won’t engage you.  If you can’t do this internally, call me.

2. Cross-Promoting Great Content

We recently introduced a “News Flash” feature that allows us to provide investors in every corner of AGORACOM with breaking/important small-cap news as it happens.  As a result, investors that may be focused on a particular HUB or group of HUBS on AGORACOM are discovering new ideas every day.

More than just lip service, click-through analysis shows these are a big hit with AGORACOM visitors and a good reason to both keep returning to the site and consuming our content.

3. Great Platform

Small-Cap Investors continue to flock to AGORACOM thanks to what we believe is the best small-cap community platform on the web. By providing Wiki and UGC tools to our members, we’ve put significant control into their hands and that has benefited the entire community. From adding/editing/updating content, to self-policing their own HUBS, members have created a small-cap community that is more informative and cleaner than any other small-cap site on the web. It isn’t perfect – but it is as close to perfect as you can get using today’s technology.

4.  Mobile

We are seeing dramatic results from mobile devices that will be the subject of a separate blog post over the next few days.  In the meantime, suffice it to say that mobile traffic is big and expanding rapidly as small-cap investors check in from the road, waiting rooms, the beach and any other place away from their PC.  This is traffic we simply didn’t have a couple of years ago and we expect it to climb significantly for years to come.  Hence, why we recently announced the launch of our iPhone Small Cap App.

CONCLUSION

Going forward, we’ll be adding further fuel to the fire via the following exciting initiatives:

* Rapid traffic expansion in 2011 thanks to greater product variety for public companies

* Our upcoming mobile push in Q1, including the launch of an Android and Blackberry App to complement our iPhone App and of course our Blackberry partnership

* Our next online conference in Q2.  Our first one brought in over 17,500 investors from 77 countries.

* An expanded content push (Holding our cards close to our chest)

* A greater social media push (Look for Facebook and Twitter integration announcements)

All in all, we’re excited about the next 12 months and beyond.  If you think we’ve come a long way, you ain’t seen nothin’yet.

Thanks to our great clients and members for continuing to make AGORACOM the best community platform within the small-cap industry.

Regards,
George