BlogWorld Expo is on at the moment and there are several places running commentary on what’s happening. WebProNews has a good summary of the events, one of which caught my eye. It reports on Don Crowther, founder of SMARTS, and his views on using social media to bring traffic to your Web sites.
He quoted some interesting figures. If your primary aim is to obtain traffic from Google or any of the other search engines then perhaps you should consider these statistics:
Statistics show that Facebook is almost as big as Google in pageviews. YouTube is double in page views according to Alexa. Facebook adds 100-250K new viewers each day.
Those number put social media at least on a par with the search engines. The real question is whether or not that traffic can be leveraged to deliver more traffic. Users that access search engines do so because they are looking for information. Users that access social media do so for a variety of reasons including just socializing. Information is not necessarily their prime motive. Having said that, there is certainly scope for trying to market your wares through some of the social sites around.
Crowther suggested a few social media tools that should be used to gain traffic. I am not sure I would agree with all of them.
Squidoo was his number one option. I covered this a little while ago (Have You Researched Squidoo For Social Marketing?). I am not to sure about the traffic generated, however there are a lot of marketers who use it and swear by it.
HubPages was his second tip. The danger with HubPages is that it can quite quickly outrank your own site for the same keywords. That would be fine if you could openly link back to your own pages. Don’t write hubs with keywords that will steal traffic from your own pages.
Create your own wiki was the third option. This may work well for some however it may also be out of the league for many.
There followed the usual players in Twitter, Facebook, Digg and creating your own video. If you are looking for traffic that converts then don’t rely on Digg, or StumbleUpon for that matter either. The reports from BlogWorld Expo make interesting reading and provide an insight into how some of the bigger players use web 2.0 to advance their businesses.
