Social Media Traffic : Insight through stats

Here is some statistical information that shall be of help to all those guys wondering : which social media tool is best-suited for my product/service ? This information comes from a 287,090 impression based report from an online advertising network agency, Chitika.

It is clearly evident that there is a significant variation in traffic aspirations across the social media sites. Facebook is about news and community, MySpace about entertainment, and Twitter is predominantly news.

Now, this information coupled with your conversion rate across these media, and marketing strategy, can definitely help figure out the social media most suited to your purpose.

Marketer's Dilemma : Paid Search or Social Media

The recent news of Facebook beating Google to become the most visited site in US raises new questions for internet marketing, the most prominent one being - where to invest the next marketing dollars : paid search(and organic search) or social media(particularly facebook) ?

The rise of Social Media has been consistently fast-paced ever since 2006. But even today, for most of the firms, majority of internet marketing budget is spent over Search(SEO+SEM), followed by PPC and affiliate marketing. Social Media marketing gets a very small chunk of the budget, and the investment is mostly considered experimental. However, this landscape is rapidly changing, and an increasing number of firms are investing considerably in Social Media, which is also evident from the increasing number of social media marketing firms opening every month.

A few key differences between these two marketing media are listed below. In case you feel any major difference has been left out, do mention it as a comment.

	Paid Search	Social Media
Art vs. Science	An almost perfect science	A mix of both – creativity is important
Targeting	Usually nothing, at best location-based	Much better targeting, based on personal interests, social groups, age, etc.
Order of Events	Customers come to your site looking for something, and then you provide them a good experience	You provide customers a good experience(through social media interaction), and if they like it, they come to your site
Quality of Traffic	Poor. Conversion rate usually low.	Higher than Paid Search(and lower than Direct Traffic)
Click-fraud protection	Robust	Yet to see some good examples here
Tracking consumer activity	Limited information	Lot of information
Success Metrics	Well defined	Not so well defined
Additional capabilities		CRM, Market Research

Thus, it is very important that next time you pen down your internet marketing budget, do compare paid search with social media with respect to your goals, and do a strategic allocation. It is equally important to integrate all these marketing efforts with a coherent theme, and a clear, concise, and consistent message.

Times have changed - you no longer have the control of communication with customers, least so on the internet. Consumers decide how to interact with you - you need to understand that, and establish your presence where your customers are looking for you. So, the Paid Search vs. Social Media debate for you essentially boils down to where your customers are !

Social Media Marketing Jungle : Embracing the wilderness

Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.

"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.

"I don't know," Alice answered.

"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

(from 'Alice in Wonderland')

Social Media Marketing enthusiasts often ask me about which Social Media technology they should use : Facebook or Twitter, Youtube or Blog , .. and so on. Seems like they are all excited to engage in Social Media, and determined to leverage this social media boom at the earliest. But often they miss the point that planning or action has a pre-requisite - a clear, concise, and measurable goal.

This mad rush for first mover advantage - being the first to set up online communities related to a particular product/service, or to sign contract or take control over existing communities/web-portals relevant to firm's product or to launch viral marketing campaigns - soon leaves them exhausted with little returns. Through an analysis of several social media marketing failures in the past year, we realize that most common factor is not lack of passion, rather it is lack of direction. In other words, you may call it : The Curse of Choices. Since, there are so many ways to engage(and invest time, money and effort) in social media that unless you have a concise goal, clear definition of target audience, and a sound marketing strategy, you would end up with few returns.

Having realized the importance of a concise goal, let's look at some examples of good goals for social media marketing campaigns. Do resist the temptation of adopting any of them "as is", since that way you would end up landing at someone else's destination, rather than reaching yours.

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing relevant visitor traffic
• Increasing conversion of visitors into consumers(pushing down the conversion funnel)
• Managing reputation

Having distinctive goals shall not only be a good guide during this safari, but also shall help you get the maximum utilization of your resources by spending them strategically. It shall help you to analyse the several social media channels for their effectiveness with respect to your goals, and define the metrics of success to be constantly monitored, and analysed.

Facebook beats Google, becomes most visited site : really ?

Facebook, riding a terrific wave of growth in its popularity, achieved yet another milestone last week - it toppled Google.com to become the most visited US site as mentioned in the weekly report from Hitwise, an online traffic monitor. Facebook.com had outpaced Google.com in the past as well, but it was only on major festive occasions such as Christmas and New Year. This is for the first time that Facebook has surpassed Google in weekly site visits. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. The tremendous growth pace of Facebook can be seen in the graph below.

At this point of time, however, these results need to be perceived with caution due to a couple of reasons :

• Other online traffic monitors such as Alexa, Compete and Quantcast continue to report Google.com as the site receiving the highest number of hits from US.
• The traffic monitoring mechanism of Hitwise is not publicly known, and nor do we know the critically important factor : sample size.
• Since Facebook, due to its inherent nature, is way more sticky than Google.com, a better measure for comparing them would be "number of unique visitors", rather than just "site visits". Also, an increasing number of internet users are doing Google search through either toolbar or other Google services such as GMail, Calendar, Reader, etc. Thus, just the "number of site visits" for Google.com does not effectively capture the popularity of Google search.
• Another big reason for this huge up-surge in the "site visits" to Facebook could be the "share on Facebook" widget which is being increasingly integrated with all the major websites worldwide. Though the action of sharing a link on Facebook requires calling facebook.com(for login), does it really qualifies as Facebook traffic ?

Hence, while there is no doubt that facebook's popularity has been sky-rocketing, and "average time spent per visit" on it is considerably greater compared to Google.com; it is highly probable that Facebook traffic comprises of repeated visits by a smaller sub-set compared to Google.com's traffic composition : less repeated site-visits by a much larger set of users. So, before arriving at any conclusions, we need to ask : are using the right metrics to compare the popularity of these two internet leaders ?