Search Engine or Social Media Traffic for Small Business. Which One is Better?
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There are a lot of buzz in web community about web traffic from social media sites like Twitter, Digg, or Facebook. Many suggest that social media will replace traditional search engines. Really? We know that there are a lot of stories about some 17 year old kids who sells music through YouTube videos but it doesn’t mean that YouTube is a perfect market place for 50 year old business owner who can sell napkins, pens, boat trailers, or anything else. There are some exceptions like Blendtec which sold a thousands blenders after producing Will it Blend? viral videos but still, can every business use social media?
Let’s analyze traffic you are getting from social sites and search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Searching for product or service people often type specific keywords and visit several websites to make a choice. Company which provides product or service for competitive price have a big chance to turn visitor into customer.
Traffic flow from search engines:
When people come on a website using search engine their attention focused on the product, description, price, and company which sells it. Even when person leave without purchase, he or she still remember a lot of information about company and product.
Traffic from social sites is different than traffic from search engines. People come on social media sites to find friends, communicate, read news, or just kill some time. Visitors stay on social site and even when they follow some link, back in their mind they are still think that they are on social network. Their next step will be “back” button to find what else people posted, tweeted, or shared on social site like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. In most cases visitors never click ads, follow offers, buy products, and don’t even remember name of a website they just visited.
There are also many different reasons why people follow links on social website:
- Curiosity to find where friend work
- Curiosity to find which website or blog people have
- To see some cool or funny photo, video, or content
- Read some news or press release and comment back on friend wall
- See who spam with offers (to remove from friend list)
As you see, many visits cannot be transferred into lead or sale.
Traffic flow from social sites:
Of course there are some niches which benefit from social sites more than search engines. Club and restaurant owners can create groups and invite people. Music and video industry generate sales promoting on MySpace or Facebook. Ringtone sellers offer high-school kids to download “free ringtones” and collect money from their parents when it is time to pay bill. But, if you are in traditional business selling something useful like paper bags or push pins… don’t wais your money on social media. Try offline advertising or regular SEO to promote keywords like: buy paper bags, cheap paper bags, paper bags in Boston, recycled paper bags etc…
