Social Media = Useless traffic?

On 1st feb, I wrote this long blog post about social media and its myth. As you can guess, I am wondering about this so called “Social” traffic. With the buzz of launch of $1000+ products created more buzz and everyone is wondering if its really the right way to go?

Marketers will sell you what is selling (heck I tell you do so too). And if a bunch of baloney is selling… they’ll sell it…

If you remember in my old post when I got stumbled. I really asked the merit of this traffic.

I talked to few guys who got dugg, stumbled and few other phenomenons like that… according to them it feels good by getting traffic like that… good ego boost. But unless its really targeted, the traffic is not of much value.

Businessweek.com recently (7th feb) published an article Generation myspace is getting fed up . Here’s something for you to read.

Uh-oh. Social networking was supposed to be the Next Big Thing on the Internet. MySpace, Facebook, and other sites have been attracting millions of new users, building sprawling sites that companies are banking on to trigger an online advertising boom. Trouble is, the boom isn’t booming anymore. Like Heritage, many people are spending less time on social networking sites or signing off altogether.

And something more

Google, which has a $900 million guaranteed deal with MySpace for placing ads alongside search results, says existing ad approaches aren’t working well on social networks so far. “I don’t think we have the killer, best way to advertise and monetize social networks yet,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Here’s the most interesting tidbits…

Social networks have some of the lowest response rates on the Web, advertisers and ad placement firms say. Marketers say as few as 4 in 10,000 people who see their ads on social networking sites click on them, compared with 20 in 10,000 across the Web. Mark Seremet, president of video game publisher Green Screen, stopped advertising on MySpace last spring because of a 13-in-10,000 response rate. “It’s really hard to make money on that anemic click-through rate,” says Seremet.

If google an internet giant hasn’t figured out how to make killing with these, how do you think a local marketer will fare? Anyways you should read that article…

ETR also got dismal rates on turning this traffic into anything positive.

In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors. How many of them do you think converted into subscribers.

500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?

No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.

Read more at ETR.

Now you can decide if the social buzz is really buzzing or not… Frankly speaking I have only found one way which can help and its not really White hat(so to speak). Its more on the side of mass building (if you know anything about mass building, it is really temporary).

Raise your rankings using mass building techniques using social media and get traffic differently than getting dugg, stumbled or whatever.

In my own test of getting stumbled… I can tell you, you can get few thousands unique in few hours by using funny pictures (specially if they are not already circulated on web). Videos rank a close second… Motivational videos doesn’t generate the kind of response I was expecting.

Do this and you’ll get traffic and may be you can show it to people and sell another “Social media traffic Course” to marketers (darn, I am giving out my own secrets)?

This is one of the reason in my earlier blog post, I urged you to look at how non-seo, non-marketing people are using web. Oh btw you should read my earlier post on web 2.0 and why you should be concerned about it… (in related articles)

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About the Author

Varun Pratap is working in online business as a pro blogger from 2004. His blog on Imbasics (Internet marketing Basics) is all about making money online ethically without resorting to tricks, techniques and gimmicks.

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By Varun Pratap | Filed Under Increase Web Site traffic, Marketing Rant 

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One Response to “Social Media = Useless traffic?”

  1. Anonymous on February 11th, 2008

    Social Media = Useless traffic? | Strategic Internet Marketing…

    The Internet has been buzzing with praise for “social media” as the way to drive traffic to your website. Im going to show you that this massive traffic isnt all its cracked up to be….

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