Really interesting research data from ad network Chitika, via eMarketer on the quality of visitors from social networking sites.
The Chitika study looked at the quality of traffic from search engines and social networks, and the results were a little surprising. According to Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic to your web site than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing.
More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal, about the same percentage as Twitter. Read more...(245 words, 3 images, estimated 59 secs reading time)
One of the best things about a blog is that you get to talk about and exchange ideas on what is working and not working in social media. That is good.
The downside is that by sharing you might wake up one morning and find out that the tactics(s) that you have been using successfully no longer work. Either because the search engines manually adjusted your site, or because a lot of people started to use that tactic thus devaluing it.
This is a topic that Aaron Wall at SEObook.com wrote about today and Brent Csutoras wrote a great post on Shoemoney.com recently about over sharing. Read more...(414 words, 1 image, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)
Next Monday (June 2nd) I will be talking at the Boston Internet Marketing SEO Networking Meetup about how we have used social media sites like stumbleupon, digg.com etc to create targeted links and traffic. My presentation will be followed by a round table discussion on social media.
If you are in the Boston area and are coming to the event I hope that you will stop by and introduce yourself
I recently had the chance to ask search engine optimization expert Aaron Wall about reputation management and how to use different social media tools to “squeeze out” negative references from showing up on the search results page. This was a topic that Aaron had written about in the past and I am grateful to Aaron to take time to answer my questions Read more...(771 words, 1 image, estimated 3:05 mins reading time)
Last month I pulled back the curtain a little and gave a look inside a social media campaign that we are currently undertaking for soccer tickets online. The story generated quite a few comments and emails and I wanted to provide an update on how the campaign is going.
To summarize our initial efforts we created five targeted social media events focused around creating awareness for the web site. Two of the events went popular on Digg and two made the buzz page at StumbleUpon. As a result these two web sites sent over 5,000 visitors to the web site. Read more...(572 words, 1 image, estimated 2:17 mins reading time)
I had an interesting conversation with a new client yesterday. The conversation was around goals and what we wanted to achieve during our campaign. As the conversation progressed I was struck by how social media is changing how we market online.
If I think back to how this conversation would have gone two years ago I am sure we would have been focused on discussing keywords and how to get onto the first page of Google for them. The complete strategy would have been focused around the web site. Read more...(328 words, 1 image, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
Wal-Mart is making yet another attempt to add social media to its web site according to Advertising Age. Wal-Mart which has failed miserably in its other social media attempts has decided that that consumer-generated content is the new way to go.
Wal-Mart’s previous social media attempts included a MySpace-like offering aimed at teens was a miserably failure and was shut down after less than three months. It failed mainly because Wal-Mart screened all the content, informed parents when their children joined and forbade users to e-mail one another. Wal-Mart tried again earlier this year with a travelogue “blog” that it was forced to stop when news got out that the blog was created and paid for by its PR firm. Read more...(364 words, 1 image, estimated 1:27 mins reading time)
Over the last two weeks we have conducted two different experiments to measure what social media sites sent traffic. In creating the test environment we deliberately picked two blogs that were unknown with no existing backlinks to them. We also did not attempt to “game” or promote these blog post on any of the social media sites that we contacted.
Our first experiment was with a blog post called The Story of Tea. We submitted the post to 20 social media sites and watched the page become the 3rd most viewed page on the site with 826 page views! The second post was called “Shopping For Tents” and we submitted the post of about 30 social media sites. That post has had 303 page views. Read more...(642 words, 1 image, estimated 2:34 mins reading time)
Thursday marked day four of this weeks social media traffic experiment. Not surprisingly traffic has slowed down, but with over 300 page views this week, the post continues to receive traffic and readers.
On Thursday afternoon I submitted the post to Fark.com and I was happy to see 8 referrals to the site yesterday. The social media sites sending traffic to the blog are:
Stumbleupon.com – 117 Visits
Reddit.com – 28 Visits
Fark – 8 visits
Digg.com – 4 Visits
Google Referral – 3 Visit (this is for Google bookmarks)
It is quite apparent after only two tests that links from social media sites can have a very positive impact on your search engine rankings, especially with Google.
Ranking high in search results is one of the huge payoffs I’ve noticed while submitting to social bookmarking sites. Even if a particular site doesn’t bring a lot of direct traffic, these sites tend to get indexed often and rank high in Google’s SERPs. Even if no one from Digg actually visits your site, just having the link on Digg will boost your search results, which is a benefit that certainly can’t be ignored.
Read more...(329 words, 1 image, estimated 1:19 mins reading time)
