Top Posts in 2011 are Remarkably Old School

My annual review of year-end readership statistics from the "Strategic Guy" blog was encouraging...and somewhat discouraging. 

Let's start with the good.  Although my pace of publishing declined from 87 posts in 2010 to 61 last year due to new writing commitments I took on with the Washington Business Journal, Washington Executive and Govwin, the quantity of unique visits to the blog site exceeded 10,000 with nearly 17,000 page views.

Web search is the primary driver of traffic, yet I also realized a consistent flow of readers from Strategic Communications Group's (Strategic) corporate Web site and presence in online communities like Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn.

An analysis of the blog site's most popular posts in terms of readership is where I grow concerned.  Here are the top three, each of which exceeded 500 unique visits. 

Three Phases of Social Media Maturation, published on April 12, 2009

Great SaaS Debate, published on January 19, 2008

Company Wide Social Media Engagement: A Bridge Too Far, published on March 1, 2011

Based on Strategic's competency in social media and focus on serving clients in the technology markets, these posts are all relevant topics that reinforce our expertise.  What's the problem?

Check out the dates of publication.  The most popular post is nearly three years in the can, while the second most popular is now four years dated.

Did the issues, trends, technologies and best practices I addressed in 2011 fail to resonate with readers?  And how should I evolve my editorial and content plan based on this review of analytics?

A couple of questions I'll be thinking about during the next few weeks.