While 67 percent of respondents to a recent survey use the social media platform Facebook to promote their businesses, only 29 percent find the site effective for driving traffic to their website.
These findings come from a recently published report from website software and training company Intellimon, in partnership with the University of Bradford. The report is based on a survey of more 4,000 online businesses, and was designed to better understand the nature of challenges facing businesses marketing themselves on the internet.
Other findings from the report include the following:
- 27.2 percent of respondents said Twitter was effective for generating website traffic;
- While 62 percent of respondents were 50 years of age or older, the youngest age group (18-43) had the highest success rate with their traffic generation efforts (25.6 percent);
- Despite choosing search engines as the most important traffic generation tool, 62.8 percent of respondents perform search engine optimization checks only monthly or less frequently; and
- Less than 10 percent of respondents said they outsource their traffic generation activities, typically leaving the task up to a single business owner/operator to carry out.
COMMENTARY: This report appears to correlate with the opinion of Globe and Mail that social media is wrong for growing revenues and should be about developing fan engagement and deeper fan relationships.
In another article, Twitter, which just recently began to monetize its large audience, was confronted with mixed reviews by advertisers, many of them believing that since Twitter is a free service, they can develop followers at a cost that is next to nothing, and not have to pay for advertising using Promoted Tweets.
In another study, it was found that 75% of small businesses have a Facebook page, but due to skepticism about Facebook as an effective advertising medium, only 40% are actually using Facebook to promote their brands, and those that do spend for Facebook ads are spending very little.
According to Forrester Research, social media spending is forecasted to hit about $1 billion or roughly only 3% of total online advertising in 2010. Social media will grow at a 34% compounded annual growth rate between 2009 and 2014, but will only represent about 6.5% of total online advertising.
In still another study, eMarketer reported that only 50% of brands worldwide are not sure of social media's value. What was really interesting was that 60% of their CEO's still do not have a Facebook fan page. Perhaps the latter may be than corporate CEO's are mostly blood suckers (health care providers, banks, Big Pharma, Big Oil and investment banking firms, just to name a few), concerned mostly with maximizing shareholder value, by fleecing consumers, laying off employees or exporting jobs overseas to increase earnings per share. Nice guys. Some fan base that would be.
A study conducted by Vocus and Brian Solis was reported by eMarketer found that marketers are already suspect of large numbers of followers and their true value. Better said, it is all about popularity vs. influence, with influence being the desired target of most marketers.
"The new report from Vocus and FutureWorks principal Brian Solis throws a healthy dose of skepticism on the supposed correlation between popularity and influence. The report—provocatively titled “Influencer Grudge Match: Lady Gaga versus Bono”—surveyed 739 marketing and communications professionals who work with influencers to gauge their perceptions of what makes an influencer."
While the numbers pointed to more marketers seeing influencers with smaller groups of tightly connected friends being the more desirable target v. larger groups with loose or no connection (57% v. 44%) how they end up measuring success in campaigns falls back on quantity trumping quality. Presumably this is because it’s the easiest metric to obtain and is more objective (or is it?). The chart below bears this out.
OK marketers so what is this saying? You want to have your cake and eat it too but this is not congruent is it? Too often, the intent (what you like to provide for measurement) has little to do with the reality of marketing and social media.
Rather than just admitting that there is a gap in measuring effectiveness of social media and working to find ways to provide meaningful measures of success and / or failure, marketers turn to their Pavlovian response of giving people any measurement to prove their worth. Apparently, whether there is any relationship between the measurement and reality is secondary. That’s too bad because what is really at stake is the credibility of social media as an effective marketing tool and this does nothing to help, but plenty to hurt, the cause.
These obvious correlations are really starting to add up, don't you think, and there are more such studies that I probably missed.
Courtesy of an article dated November 11, 2010 appearing in eM+C
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