2016 State of the Group

Hawaii Web Group’s year in review – By Chris Norberg, Project Manager

This has been the biggest year for changes at Hawaii Web Group so far!

We grew massively in 2015 (see the State of the Group 2015 report) and 2016, learned some big lessons, and made some important changes. Some of the highlights from 2016:

2,278,324 users – Hawaii Web Group websites increased users by 35.46% compared to 2015.
554,623 social followers – We had an increase of 26.6% in followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram compared to 2015.
97,519,516 impressions with 2,721,683 engagements on social media.
The addition of a new website: Maalaea.com
A new partnership with Google and Nest Labs for web cameras around Maui.
A focus on restaurants, accommodations, and activities.
A new office in Makawao Town. Learn more about our Paia office experience.
I’ve also made some personal and business changes outlined on LinkedIn.

What kind of traffic do our sites enjoy?

An overview of the past and present annual absolute unique visitors (now referred to as “users” by Google Analytics.)

Almost every year we’ve seen our own sites grow with quality traffic due to search engine ranking and social media shares. The only time we’ve had negative growth was in 2013 when we put all of our effort into rebuilding our main site, MauiInformationGuide.com.

Each year, we build new sites but we also kill off old ones. Example, we merged LahainaHalloween.com with LahainaTown.com this year. We’re trying to focus on as few HWG sites as possible, but new opportunities come up all the time.

Hawaii Social Media

Hawaii Web Group’s social media following and current reach.

We’ve wasted a lot of time on social platforms that have died or are dying (ex. Vine…) But our strongest social profiles are doing great and very helpful in sharing new content.

Our Audience

Hawaii Web Group websites’ audience by gender, age, location, device, and socially.

Our websites’ audience has been primarily visitor traffic interested in the island of Maui, Hawaii. This focus will be changing in 2016 as we make more of an effort to reach all island visitors (not just those that love our wonderful island.) You’ll begin to see more sites and social media activity for the other islands.

2017 Goals

Hawaii Web Group continues viral blogging and becoming more efficient

We build an enormous amount of new content for Hawaii every month. That being said, becoming more efficient is going to be our main goal this next year.

Continued slow growth with more efficiency all around. Sounds good to us! If you need to promote your Hawaii business online, please let us know.

Give us a shout!