Social Media versus Search Engines for Website Traffic

Getting visitors to your website is a primary goal, but finding loyal visitors is even better. According to research by ad network Chitika, leads generated from Facebook and Digg are more likely to create repeat vistitors than search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. In the course of one week, more than 1/5th of users referred to a website by Facebook visited at least four times. Google-referred visitors were less loyal at 12%. And visitors coming from Twitter were the least likely to return.

But in the bigger picture, social media sites are only sending a small fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.” Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%. Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.

What's a web marketer to do? Staying "in the conversation" is more important than ever.Google and Microsoft have both made deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has one with Facebook that integrates Twitter and Facebook updates into Bing search results. Google will soon be adding tweets to search results.

Google's Marissa Mayer says, "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

These Twitter and Bing's deals make it all the more important for marketers to be found in real-time searches and Facebook/Twitter in general:

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about current events
3. Increase your followers
4. Promote conversation with retweets, linked in answers, etc.
5. Include calls to engagement

You have to keep people talking to stay relevant "right now." Subscribe to the Strategy140 blog for upcoming information on these social media marketing tactics.