Hey, I’m Hector Kolonas, and if we’ve ever met, you’ll know I’m a little bit of a geek.
When it comes to data, especially how, when, and where people and businesses work – I go full geek.
So much so that back in 2020 I started sharing interesting links, data sets, and stories I found from in and around the coworking world with a few friends.
Skip forward to the end of 2023 and 1000+ industry leaders from some of the world’s most creative, largest, nichiest, inclusive, exclusive, and market-defining flex space businesses interact with my weekly newsletters and summaries.
In my day job, I help flex office businesses and landlords turn painfully disconnected systems into deeply integrated processes that improve overheads and create actionable insights from existing data.
So, as a firm believer that unexamined data just takes up head and server space, I’ve been exploring how the (anonymous) data gathered from my newsletter could be turned into insights for brands, businesses, and content creators.
“We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights.”
Given that my newsletter is all about sharing valuable, informative or otherwise interesting links, let’s start with looking at where the growing number of email subscribers and website visitors were landing up FROM reading the newsletter.
To do so, I analyzed the number of click-throughs to different domains.
A bit of background info: Links for TWIC are sourced through a number of methodologies.
Most are kept under wraps to keep out spambots and AI-generated content from bringing my curation process to its knees. However, there is a public mechanism for email subscribers to share links they also found interesting before each newsletter is curated. Businesses looking to support coworking spaces can acquire sponsorship slots for guaranteed placement within a defined block in the email and web version; or work directly with me to support how they position themselves or their content.
I note this to highlight that the data and insights shared here are obviously skewed toward wherever shared content was discovered or pointed to.
Disclaimer: Click-through data is gathered anonymously across web and mobile versions of the ThisWeekInCoworking newsletter. No subscriber or visitor information is ever attached to this click data. A one-way encrypted hash of the IP is held temporarily to avoid duplicate counts or other click manipulations – and then dropped.
So where did TWIC clicks go?
What we see here is which non-social-media sites (excluding clubhouse) got the most click-throughs per month from both email and web newsletter summaries since March 2022.
It’s a good eagle-eye view of who is creating or hosting content that is engaging busy decision-makers across the coworking world.
What’s fascinating is that a lot of the content comes from independent content creators (or personal brands) within the industry, with a strong representation from coworking alliances and impact orgs. We also see some industry news sites (I don’t link to gated content), event registrations, and Clubhouse’s now-you-see-me flurry of activity.
Taking a deeper look at the data, it’s also really interesting to see how the clicks go to different mediums of content, from podcasts to resources to written industry insights.
It’s also fun to look at the click-through spread across the types of content I share (namely news & views, tech updates, market moves, discussions, and data sets).
Interested in looking deeper at the data together, or exploring how you could leverage these insights for your business? Drop me an email.
In the previous data set, I excluded links to most social media channels, purely because I wanted to have a look at which independent creators and brands were directly benefiting from creating strong content on their own sites or platforms.
However, I do think there are also interesting insights to be gleaned from which social media platforms busy industry leaders and decision-makers clicked towards the most.
For coworking and the flex industry in general, it seems the most engaging social media content would be LinkedIn with a strong lead.
At an aggregate number of clicks, it seems more engaging content was shared, and discovered on Twitter, than on Facebook or Instagram.
Note: This could also mean I need to tweak my processes to gather more industry-related content from other social networks. So I’ll make some tweaks and see how it affects the numbers in future analyses.
What this does tell creators, brands and operators is that LinkedIn should be part of your content strategy. However, given they often penalize posts with links with less reach, I’d keep an eye on how to get social media engagement into a platform you control like your own blog, site, or email list as soon as possible.
Content creators across multiple industries are complaining recently about a change that drastically dropped their reach on LinkedIn for content formats that were previously doing very well. This is a huge risk if you focus too much on only gathering reach on 3rd party platforms.
Not sure what coworking-focused content to create, post, repurpose, or where to start? I’m no social media ‘guru’, but I can share what a growing data set of over 300,000 anonymized clicks is interested in reading, clicking on, and engaging with. Let’s chat.
Hector, what about data insights within our flex space business?
Just like all this data, and it’s insights, were hidden within anonymized click data – your workspace business is a trove of data-driven insights spread across a frustrating number of databases and systems.
Reach out to Syncaroo for a free 1-on-1 to explore how you could not only automate away tedious-but-important tasks – but also turn your own data into a continuous stream of insights.
What about social media channels?