Most companies will wax lyrical about how much traffic social media is sending them. I heard in one presentation that ASOS was now receiving more traffic via Facebook than Google (which is almost certainly incorrect, since the Keyword Tool tells us the brand receives 3.5 million search a month on exact match!).
Social media definitely does send traffic via referrals – on one of our sites a Twitter profile drives 15% of all visits (most of them being repeat visits). That doesn’t get anywhere near to Google, but it’s bigger than Yahoo!, Facebook and Bing put together.
But enough of all this – social media really drives all forms of traffic, search included, and you can supercharge it to be a real driver in traffic building.
Behold – the World’s Crappest Infographic!
Okay, so I’m clearly no designer, but I had to get something vaguely understandable in front of senior executives, and I only had Microsoft Word 2003 to play with.
Check it out… Now here’s the process:
Phase #1 Profile Growth
We’ll leave out ‘setting up’ a social profile as a pre-stage as no one is daft enough not to have a social media profile for their brand – right? Growth from a profile takes a bit of resource and time – but you got to do it for the model to work. Basically, you can use the following:
- Posting content and interacting with fans (that woolly word engagement)
- Sweepstakes and competitions (run these with an app platform on Facebook – like Wildfire)
- Targeted advertising (promoted Tweets, or Facebook Social Stories – these are cheap for fan/follower acquisition!)
Phase #2a Larger Social Media Profiles
So it really depends on your market and what you sell, but let’s take media for example. I believe the ‘Larger Social Media Profiles’ stage, where you can capture data and poll users meaningfully really starts at around 10,000 for media brands, although it could be much smaller if you have high engagement. Bottom line is, you achieve this Phase when you can collect meaningful data from your fanbase.
Phase #2b Data Capture and Polling
You can run contests and collect data via Facebook applications – then put all these conversions into your email database, so you have them on two accounts.
The use of polling then has further reaching consequences than insight alone. As well as increasing fan engagement, you can create data sets that editorial + designers can use to create content and design infographics – basically sharable linkable content.
Phase #3a Even Larger Social Media Profiles
You reach this stage when your profiles have become so large that they can be used a advertising tools. For instance, they would offer significant value to a brand if it was mentioned and recommended from the profile, because the reach is so large. I’m going to use an indicative figure, but I believe in media real value is only reached past 50,000 fans, and it would be preferable to be 80,000. Now then – the benefits of massive profiles are fourfold:
- Data sets are much larger
- Referral traffic to associated destination site would be higher
- Direct traffic would likely increase, as people have more regular contact with the brand
- Natural search (!) see below
Phase #3b – Natural Search
Because links posted on massive social media profiles will generate potentially thousands of clicks, posting links to third parties presents high value to the mentioned third party. Agreements can be worked whereby the third party agrees to put a permanent natural link on their website, in exchange for a social media ‘plug’ whereby a bit.ly to their content is merely posted to the fans. I’ve used this for great success – small guy gets a burst of traffic in exchange for a permanent link (which drives no traffic directly). Of course, indirectly, you’ll go shooting up a search engine.
Conclusive Benefits:
So we’ve listed a ton of benefits – but here they are in summary:
- Massive social media profiles mean more people are connected to a brand’s messaging.
- Data collection becomes cheaper and easier, no longer reliant on just editorial.
- Journalist research times are cut because we own easily accessible data sets, the criteria of which are set by the journalists exact to their requirements.
- The traffic growth potential benefits are also threefold:
- Referral traffic from social media sites is larger.
- You’ll be in a stronger position to form strong relationships with Third Party sites that will send referral traffic and build natural links to content, which would enhance SEO.
- Direct traffic and branded search would also increase, as more users become engaged with the brands on social media.
So there you have it, social media drives all forms of traffic.
