Is Social Media Worth The Effort?
February 9, 2009
It all depends what you want to accomplish. I spend a fair amount of time on SEO related forums. Social Media is the buzz topic everywhere. That is especially true when the topic of social bookmarking is concerned.
The vast majority of the responders agree social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us is the best way to drive traffic and create backlinks. A website like Digg can produce 100’s of thousands of visitors in a short amount of time. This is known as the Digg effect. There have been numerous reports of servers crashing due to Digg induced traffic spikes. However, everything that I have read reports dismal results for converting visitors into customers.
So I wondered if every white paper that I have read on this topic states that social media visitors are poor at converting into customers, then why all this buzz. Then I realized that many of the people who visit these forums have websites designed to create traffic only. They often highly target a specific high volume keyword. They make their money through AdSense and affiliate marketing programs.
These sites want you to exit their website by clicking on a text link. This is their only reason for existing. So all they focus on is creating traffic. Their ROI is based on you leaving their website because they often have nothing to sell themselves.
We have ventured into the social media fray ourselves. Whenever we post an article to our blog we use social media sites to create traffic. We use Technorati, Stumble, and Digg. We started the process a month ago and we have seen a five fold increase in traffic. However, this has not lead to one sales call, lead, or email inquiry. It has not been a total loss as we have acquired lots of links through the process. So for us the ROI is measured in links.
Update 05/25/2009:
The 109 Day link building program has opened my eyes to many possibilities that I didn’t know existed. Tucson SEO has recently launched its own social media site, The Tucson Small Business Networking Group. The site has been developed to meet the niche group of Tucson businesses.
I have and will continue to recommend using these niche sites. However, they require lots of work and may not be appropriate for all businesses. You must know going in that there are certain behaviors that work and those that don’t. The whole idea is to build relationships before you begin selling most people get this part wrong!
Whats you ROI on social media?
We are officially requesting that you join the conversation here. That is, if you found that this post was at all interesting, useful, or perhaps you are just looking for a useful link. Then, I would like to entice you to comment by providing you with useful links as part of what I call “Scratch My Back Marketing.”
The Scratch My Back Marketing requires you to scratch this blog by leaving a useful comment of at least 20 words or more. Your comment should be relevant to the post. My scratch is that you will receive a Do Follow anchor text link (Keyword Luv.) And if you have a blog with an RSS feed enabled you will receive an extra permalink back to your blog via Comment Luv. We also use the Top Commenter plugin as well!
It’s all about win/win marketing. I am willing to exchange page rank for the bump that a fresh comment provides.
Are you ready to exchange comments for links?
This is the part where I move link juice around the site and hope that someone might actually want to learn more about our local small business SEO solutions and venture further.
And to learn more about our services please check out these links:
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Comments
5 Responses to “Is Social Media Worth The Effort?”
Got something to say?
Some of us use Digg to share and gain information. I haven’t seen any increase in traffic to my site but maybe that’s because I often post articles from sites other than my own and many of my posts are humor or informative posts which are not the type of posts that get many diggs. Not all Digg members are here out of greed. Some of us just enjoy sharing information.
For some of us, acquiring those links is a huge reason for using social media and is very, very, very much worth the effort. For you, it sounds like “meh, got some links, cool, but wanted x, y, or z to happen instead”. For me, it’s more like, “yah, baby! bring on the links! woohoo!!!!”.
Just different perspectives. :)
I am not suggesting Digg members are greedy. My point is that everything I have read and I read extensively, is that there id very little ROI (return on investment. ) If I had the time I would like to see if I can get a story to the top page.
As a business owner, and as an educator of business owners, I look at social media from the perspective of the bottom line. The small business owner doesn’t have a of time so we attempt to point out marketing vehicles that will produce the best results. We haven’t found that yet with social media.
As a voice for the small business owner we keep checking out new sites daily and we write about the better ones.
Thanks Dazzling Donna for the comment. If you have never read her blog then do follow the link to her site. I have been reading her blog for sometime now.
I look at everything I do from a return on investment perspective and that what motivates my writing. Gaining links is good only if Google gives value to those links. Google has made it clear that your links should be from relevant sources. So while these links may not help in the search rankings they may drive traffic and in that sense they are useful.
Yeah I have to agree. I know Social sites are great for backlinks, but what percentage are actually going to turn into customers. Other than that I say keep firing away for backlinks.
Matt