The social media optimization naysayers frequently comment that the social media sites like Myspace are places where kids hang out and you cannot effectively target them with advertising. Then late last week Hitwise published some data that showed how MySpace sent more traffic to retail web sites in the previous week than MSN.
The Hitwise report puts Yahoo! as the source of 4.69 percent of traffic to online retail sites, MySpace as 2.53 percent and MSN search at 2.33 percent for the week ending August 26th. Google leads the pack at 14.93 percent.
There is no doubt that social networking sites can be a serious driver of commercial traffic if they are targeted properly. If you are a retail web site in the U.S., and you do not have a social media optimization plan in place, then you need to develop one quickly. Otherwise that holiday traffic from MySpace is going to end up at your competitors web site
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David, I am glad you bring this up because I was just reviewing the web analytics for a retail/services client who’s target market fits the Myspace demographic pretty well. Their Myspace page is now the second leading source of traffic to their website after Google.
I am starting to see the same thing sort of data also Lee. MySpace has developed this reputation as not being advertising friendly, but I think this is more a result of badly executed advertising campaigns rather than the lack of retail interest by the MySpace audience.