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.

But before you drop that search campaign and jump into Digg, Chitikia had released some earlier data in September that showed that  social media sites are only sending a tiny fraction of traffic.  Basically Chitikia looked at the top sites sending traffic to the publishers in its network and found that Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals. Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%.

That Chitika Study concluded that

“the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.”

Interestingly, Twitter again scored low in this survey. In July, Twitter was No. 24 on Chitika’s list of top referrers, with 0.05%. By September, it had moved down to 44th place, with just a 0.02% share. Has Twitter peaked?

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.

In Brent’s post he gave several examples of where people have shared their successes on a blog and then seen their competitive advantage disappear almost overnight. Bob Mass back in 2002 announced he was selling PageRank via his Ad Network. Google read this and manually penalized his site and it took him 4 years to get his PageRank back!

In the social media space Lyndon Antcliff  who is one of my favorite social media bloggers wrote about a a piece of social media linkbait that went to the front page of Digg and was mentioned on a television news broadcast. The problem is that Lyndon gave the inside scoop on the piece and mentioned that the linkbait article was not true. He called it satire.

Overnight Lyndon got Matt Cutts attention at Google (never a good thing) and the client severed his relationship due to the negative media exposure. Lyndon later commented that the short lived fame from exposing the success of his campaign was not worth it. He even decided to remove the original post from his site saying, “At the end of the day it did more harm than good discussing publicly such effective tactics.”

Unfortunately that is a position that I find myself in. We run social media campaigns for our own properties as well as for client sites. All of our clients have seen substantial increases in traffic, leads and conversion since we added a social media component to their online marketing strategy. If I continue to disclose what tactics we are using and our client sites lose the competitive advantage they have, we are doing them and ourselves a disservice.

Starting today I will not be disclosing any techniques and tricks that we are currently using. Instead I will be focusing on more general social media topics and tactics.

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

Q: I read the post you made back in January “Fighting Off Negative Publicity and Affiliates in the SERPs” where you offered a large number of resources that are available. So where does a company start? Let’s assume that negative information about a brand or company has come out and this negative information has started to show up in the SERPS. From all of the options that you identified in your January post, what are the first 3-5 steps that a company should take and why?

Aaron: I think the first step is to have empathy for the person who is writing negatively about you. Is there any truth or logic to what they said? Does it seem like something where contacting them and apologizing might sort out the issue? Don’t contact them unless the apology is sincere. If you think they are a nutcase then no sense contacting them, skip on to the next step.

Do you have an “in the press” section? One of the easiest ways to bury negative information is to feature positive coverage on your site. Pages that were ranking #12 or #15 can jump up to the first page if they are linked to from an authoritative page on your website. And a natural extension of this idea is to hire a PR firm if you can afford to, and create press worthy content that gets mentioned in the press, then link at it from your “in the press” section.

Does your company have any logical reasons to have a subdomain? One for investors or business partners? Free tools, a forum, or perhaps video content? Most brands should own at least one strong subdomain, and more if it makes sense. Currently a search for eBay on Google shows a YouTube video and Wikipedia page on the front page of the search results. Everything else is from Ebay.com.

Q: A company can have information about its brand spread across multiple social media web sites. From an SEO perspective, how do they all relate to each other? If you interlink them all, are you not creating your own network and will this not cause you problems with Google at some point?

Aaron: If you are using 1,000 cheesy social sites to linkfarm across them it might not be the best way to use your time, but many brands are expected to have a Twitter page, a MySpace page, a Facebook page, and a YouTube page. In some cultures and languages there are other sites that are just as popular as the above 4 are. If you say “connect with us” and link to those sites from your official site then many brand fans may subscribe which will lead to lots of internal links from those authoritative sites promoting your brand page and helping it rank well.

Q: Somewhat related, but is there any SEO benefit to owning your brand name and/or company name across a wide variety of social media sites like MySpace, Squidoo, Delicious, etc?

Aaron: In the recently leaked Google quality review document they stated:

“it is not uncommon today for individuals to maintain various types of personal pages on the Web. Homepages, social networking pages, and blogs have become increasingly popular. Some individuals have more than one blog and/or more than one homepage on a social networking site (e.g. myspace, facebook, friendster, mixi). When these pages are maintained by the individual (or an authorized respresentative of the individual), they are all considered to be Vital.”

From that I would say that Google expects to see these pages rank for brand related queries, and it is a great idea to promote your brand on these sites. Some of the more well known sites are probably worth putting more effort into than the smaller sites for 2 reasons

• many of the smaller sites are inundated with spam AND many of the official brands do not exist on them (both of which make Google less likely to want to promote pages from those sites)
• the larger networks have more members, which puts your brand in front of more people.

Thanx again to Aaron for his time and insight on using the SERPs in fighting negative stories about your company or brand.

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.

In addition to creating awareness about the site, one of the other goals from this initial phase of the campaign was to use social media to get this web site out of any search engine sandbox. This goal was also accomplished.

The next phase of our campaign was to focus on developing relationships with the soccer community, especially those sites that focus on MLS teams. While the initial Digg and StumbleUpon tactics were like an all out advertising blitz, this second phrase is much more tactical in its approach.

We will measure success of the campaign by the number of subscribers to the web site plus by the amount of traffic that comes from the search engines.

To reach into the soccer community we used Google, technorati and blogrolls to identify sites with our target market. Blogrolls are an often underutilized tool for finding sites within a niche market. For example we were searching for fan sites of the Kansas City Wizards. We came across a fan site called Oz City Soccer and from this site we were able to identify 10 other Kansas City Wizard sites.

Once we had created a list of fan and general soccer sites we reached out to the blog owners via email or blog comments to let them know about a post that we have written on their team. We have been extremely happy with this approach as many of the sites have linked directly to our post. Not only does this bring traffic to the web site, it also creates deep links within the site which helps us with our SEO efforts.

From zero subscribers at the start of the year the web site now a subscriber base that is in the double digit’s according to Feedburner. When the major league soccer season kicks off in a another week or so, we anticipate that the number of subscribers will jump into the hundreds.

Our other goal was to increase the amount of search engine traffic that the site receives. The table below shows the amount of search engine traffic by month:

• December – 56 referrals
• January – 270 referrals
• February – 877 referrals
• Last 30 Days – 1,762 referrals

Overall we are very happy with how the campaign is progressing. This phase of the campaign isn’t as flashy or sexy as getting on the first page of Digg or StumbleUpon’s buzz page. But a lot of that traffic (especially Digg’s) is very transitory in nature. It will not help the site grow in the long run.

By actively reaching out to other sites the web site is beginning to build stronger and deeper roots within the soccer community. This work will payoff over the coming weeks and months as the site is positioned to be a quality source of soccer information.

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.

One year ago the conversation would have moved from rankings for keywords to driving targeted traffic to the web site. While everything is still focused on the web site as the primary destination, focusing on traffic was a natural progression from just focusing on rankings, because it doesn’t matter if you ran for something that doesn’t bring visitors to your web site.

Yesterday’s conversation was about making this brand the destination of choice online, regardless of where people are searching, for their targeted keywords. Yes we want to rank highly on the search engines for the main keywords. But we also want to appear when those searches take place on Facebook, Delicious and YouTube. In addition we want to be involved in the conversations that Bloggers are having within our target niche.

Suddenly the web site is no longer the primary destination. We are willing to go out and interact with people regardless of where they are searching online, regardless of where that conversation is taking place.

This is a huge shift in mindset, both from a marketing perspective as well as a marketer perspective. But the companies that understand that social media can help them grow market share, are the ones that are positioned to take advantage of this shift.

For the marketers (and marketing companies) who are still focused on search engine ranking reports, that sound you hear is your market share disappearing.

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.

So now Wal-Mart has decided that user-generated content is to way to go. It is consumer friendly and it will help with organic search engine rankings. Why is Wal-mart focusing on user-generated content, and specifically reviews, you might ask. Well:

Wal-Mart executives said reviews and ratings were the feature most requested by customers, bearing out other indications of the importance of peer-to-peer approval. A study by Bazaarvoice, the Austin, Texas, company hired to power Wal-Mart’s reviews, and the market-research company Vizu, found that 80% of shoppers have more trust in brands that feature reviews and that 75% of shoppers say it’s extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase. Peer reviews, the study found, are preferred over expert reviews by a margin of 6-to-1.

“It gives an aura of objectivity,” said Nielsen Buzzmetrics Chief Marketing Officer Pete Blackshaw. “It enhances the consumer experience, and it elevates the trust level as well. Plus, consumer-generated media is sticky content.”

Now I can applaud Wal-Mart for not giving up on social media and continuing to try new things. It’s two previous social media experiments have shown that Wal-Mart want to control the interaction with the customer. So how will Wal-Mart react to negative customer reviews? Based on there past behavior I expect that Wal-Mart will quietly scuttle this latest social media marketing campaign before the end of the year when negative reviews start to show up across their site.

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.

Looking At The Traffic Numbers

Interestingly the same social media sites that the majority of the traffic in both experiments. The number of visitors from each social media site for both posts combined were:

• Stumbleupon.com – 512 visits
• Reddit.com – 65 visits
• Digg.com – 12 visits
• Fark – 8 visits
• Indianpad.com – 7 visits
• Google Referral – visits
• Technorati.com – 3 visits
• Netscape.com -3 visits
• Myweb2.search.yahoo.com – 2 visits
• Newsvine – 1 referral

Before the experiment began, I was expecting that based on some prior experiences that StumbleUpon would be the site to send the most traffic. The surprise was that the number was so large and that it was 5x the traffic from all of the other social media sites combined!

The traffic surprise was Reddit.com with 65 visits. I had rarely used Reddit before these experiments, but the traffic numbers indicate that Reddit is worth exploring further. I used a brand new Reddit account for these experiments, and based on these numbers I will be spending more time this month on Reddit and better understanding that community and what interests them

Is all Social Media Traffic Equal?

With any type of social traffic, you need to look beyond the raw number of visits. One way to measure quality of traffic is to see what percentage of visitors immediately left the site after reading the blog post. For Digg and Fark visitors, that number was 100%. Reddit users did not dare much better with 96% of the leaving the site and hitting the landing page. The Digg and Fark numbers are not a surprise and I believe that the Reddit numbers can be lowered by better understanding that community.

So what social site brought the best traffic? That would be StumbleUpon, where 67% of their visitors went past the landing page and visited at least one other page on the sites. So not only does StumbleUpon bring lots of traffic, it brings high quality traffic also.

Generating Links From Social Media

It can be difficult to gauge the number of incoming links from social sites in these types of experiments as the search engines do not report all your backlinks in real time. However an update to Google’s Webmaster Central does give us an insight into how the search engines look at social media links.

The Story of Tea blog post page has 63 incoming links according to Google (Yahoo shows 19 links). Those are pretty impressive numbers for such a short campaign. Remember that these are all deep links to an inside page, these are not links to the home page.
Both Google and Yahoo are showing links from trusted authority sites like Netscape, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg. These high quality links have helped propel the two posts onto page one of Google, and this in turn has helped drive organic traffic to the two web site.

So the benefit of residual effect of the social media sites will help both these sites for weeks to come as they continue to enjoy traffic from search engines (and the social media sites).

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)
• Indianpad.com – 2 Visits
• Newsvine.com – 1 Visit
• Grupl.com – 1 Visit

I noticed today that Google has updated its Webmaster Central with new link data. The Story of Tea blog post from last week has 63 incoming links according to Google (it has zero links when we started the experiment). That is an amazing number. When I looked at the links that Google is recognizing I see 14 links from Bibsonomy, 6 links from Digg and others from Netscape, Technorati, Del.icio.us. These are all links from trusted authorities and the Jolly Grub blog will continue to benefit from these links for the foreseeable future.

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.

As Adam Snider of Law Depot commented yesterday:

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.

I have been aware of the power of social media links for a while, but our two recent experiments show that you do not have to get to the first page of Digg to enjoy the benefits of social media links.

The two experiments that we have run have resulted in either the blog post itself, or the associated social media site, getting to the first page of Google within 3 days of the post being submitted to the social media sites.

Now if these pages do not continue to gain incoming links I am sure that Google will move the listing down its rankings. These posts will then probably settle in the middle of page 2 or 3 of Google and will continue to generate traffic for months to come.

If we continue to add content to our two web sites and these sites continue to gain incoming links then there is no reason why these posts will fall out of the top 15 spots on Google.

Bottom line is that just a few links from StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and Netscape can be enough to move your web site up high within Google. If you are focusing on SEO, you need to have social media marketing and linking as components of your marketing strategy.