social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter can be striking headlines and are really the “thing” when it comes to keeping up with the daily lives of friends and celebrities. But the value of social networking as a marketing tool for many companies remains a mystery. If you believe that some of the biggest fans of the blogosphere is car company should be compared without your personal blog or Twitter to keep the world from their latest ideas, products or services. But is investment, particularly in terms of time and effort paid off in terms of sales or visits to the site of blogger? In order to try to shine some ‘light on the question I recently created a small experiment to test the effectiveness of blogs and twitters as marketing tools. It is certainly not the most scientific of tests, but noted some interesting trends. Those who know me say I am a kind of fan when it comes to bikes and racing bikes in particular. For months I had planned to travel for the Motorcycle Grand Prix at Le Mans and has decided to provide real-time updates of the trip by bicycle from my phone is on a blog and Twitter, and verify the marketing of relevant traffic to a site that provides another MotoGP bike tour. So I asked some friends and contacts, email, to approach their extended networks to lure users to the two communication channels to watch the progress of the five-day trip. To ensure a fair result, both the blog and Twitter accounts used were new, so there was more traffic on the historic events forum. In addition to blogs and Twitter, also posted updates on my Facebook page exists, is primarily used to provide a benchmark for social media, Facebook is for friends who already know me and I knew Twitter earlier. On my return I looked at where the majority of referrals came from the new blog and search results yielded some interesting results. Pour through statistics showed how a well constructed blog is important, in particular, Google has been reviewing the blog several times a day, we learned that on the list of search results as soon as it started. However, first things first, I am desperate to find some other friends who are interested in motion! The levels of interest from friends on Facebook has just beaten the aliens on Twitter! More importantly, during the five days the blog has become more than a thousand views, including Twitter and Facebook combined accounted for 29% of this traffic (Facebook and Twitter 15% 14%). Surprisingly engines search generated more than double the number of visitors, for a total of 64%. 20% of these visitors were interested enough to go on a commercial blog site to see the tour on others for the future. Although the results of this simple test are inconclusive, some interesting trends seem to emerge, especially for anyone thinking of using social networking as a tool to generate business. First, both Twitter and Facebook would be good for companies that operate in an environment aimed at consumers, but only if they have something interesting to say! However, in a business to business (B2B) situation, the benefits are not so clear. First, many entrepreneurs are too busy with their work every day to keep Twitters and blogs. Similarly, the pace of change and have something interesting to say often becomes an obstacle to the creation of contents for your blog or Twitters, or to regularly update their Facebook pages. Moreover, a recent study published by a team of Harvard University showed that only 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of site content that Twitter is still the preserve of a few dedicated, despite propaganda surrounding it. The results of my research shows that while social media is an important contribution to attracting visitors, search engines remain the leading provider of blog visitors. The fact that 20% of the traffic migrated from the blog, which was not an aggressive sales pitch of the device, a commercial site, will enhance the usefulness of a blog can be commercial sites, especially if the subject contains regularly updated news and information. This not only helps the bloggers to emerge as a kind of guru in their particular field, but more importantly to increase traffic to your website and search engine rankings. In general, the Internet can, living a kind of social revolution, but when it comes to marketing online, any technique should be used in isolation, but optimization of the major search engines is the king!
Tags: Networking, open, research, road, Social