Social Media Marketing Monkeys Riding Bicycles. Is it Really All Worth it!?
Aaron Wall, author of the most fabulous SEO Book, reckons that “social media traffic is often worthless.”
You can check out his rant here. It’s a wild walk in the park for anyone intending to sell web marketing services on the back of social media networks, tools and platforms. Coming from a deeply set SEO’ers point of view, it asks a super-relevant but often overlooked question about all this rinky dink 2.0 new stuff that we’re so excited about: namely, what’s the value of web traffic driven via social media platforms?
Here’s a snippet that sets the tone:
I love this guy. (His blog is brilliant – I recommend it to anyone interested in Online PR and SEO… it’s a place where the web marketing rubber really hits the road.) The great thing about seeing the world through an SEO lens is that it’s so commercially driven and direct. SEO is obsessed with delivering one incredibly valuable thing: new traffic that spends money (or signs up) on your web site. And when this is your sole lookout, life becomes reassuringly simple (and ruthless) – your efforts either succeed or fail based on some fairly simple metrics based on traffic volumes and revenues.
As Wall states: “Traffic only becomes an asset when it translates into something else. When it becomes a bookmark, a sign-up, a link, or helps establish a genuine relationship. It must also result in an increase in revenue. If it doesn’t, then traffic remains an expense.”
Which is why he’s so skeptical about using Social Media Marketing as a pure traffic generation tactic. And rightly so…
There are a number of technology tools and agencies out there that make a virtue of deluging social media properties with your content. (For example, check out this robo-spam company.) They’ll take a snippet of your content, a bunch of your URL’s and a handful of keywords, and post and bookmark these assets like crazy on blogs, Digg, Stumbleupon and the like…. All with a view to establishing backlinkage and new, indiscriminate traffic to your site.
Now without digging into the science of SEO, we can say that there’s very little value in doing this stuff because it’s unlikely to make your cash tills ring.
Think about it: there’s an extremely tenuous link between this traffic’s original activity (hanging out on Facebook, reading ‘social’ news feeds, etc) and a decision to check out your site. At best, people might click because they’re curious – but rarely will they do so because they want to buy stuff from you (or sign up for your event, etc).
As Wall says: “the intent of the users when engaged with social media is not conducive to selling stuff.”
Contrast this with (well executed!) Search Engine Marketing, where the goal is to get into the faces of people who are actively searching for solutions in relation to a purchasing (or a research, etc) activity. When you work hard to improve your Google standing in a smart way then you’re making moves in the land of the looking. But when you deluge blog readers/FaceBook browsers/etc with spam-like sales messages/comments/bookmarks it’s a very random game indeed.
Most people don’t use Social Media Networks to make direct purchasing decisions – so, you shouldn’t be using them as a blunt traffic acquisition play. This is a dumb mistake to make (if you’re doing a lot of it today, then check out the effect it’s having on your bounce rates, page views and average times on page – I’ll wager they’re tanking).
Instead, you should be using Social Media to help deepen your relationships with customers, partners and prospects.
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Alma Gray
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