For about the last year, the non-linear creations team has been experimenting with a variety of social media sites to determine:
- Can they drive traffic to our website?
- Is the traffic they drive valuable?
We don’t have definitive answers, but the early results are illuminating.
For more on social marketing, download our whitepaper: Planning for Online Marketing: A holistic guide to marketing on the web.
Driving Traffic from Social Media
After one year, social media sites are responsible for about five percent of the traffic to nonlinear.ca – this equates to about 18% of visitors driven to our site from referring sites:
Does Social Media Traffic Drive Business Value?
The answer seems to be - it depends on the social media network. We compared the behaviour of visitors arriving from different social media sites:
Pages per Visit of Social Media Visitors
Time per Visit of Social Media Visitors
Against both of these metrics, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the “average” visitor to the non-linear creations site. Twitter visitors roughly parallel overall traffic characteristics, while both Myspace and Stumbleupon visitors fell below the average.
Conversion Rate of Social Media Visitors
Pages per visit and average time on site are helpful, but in many cases, they are just stand-ins for what you really want to measure – contribution to business objectives. In our case, we closely monitor visitor conversion rates.non-linear creations is a B2B company - our website is designed to convert visitors into potential prospects by convincing them to download one of our whitepapers, subscribe to our blog postings or newsletter, or reach out to us by phone or email. We’re proud of the job it does – about eight percent of visitors to nonlinear.ca “convert” to become prospects.
When it comes to the potential to drive real prospects, we found that Linkedin stood alone.
Traffic from Linkedin was significantly more likely to convert than the “average” visitor to nonlinear.ca. Other social media sites underperformed the average visitor profile.
Social Media and the Bottom Line
If your company is in the B2B space, consider taking the time to understand and exploit Linkedin. It offers a very real, very tangible return on the effort. One place to start is SMX Social Media Marketing - Long Beach, CA on April 22-23, 2008. I’ll be joining other analysts to discuss how you can effectively leverage social networking.�
Levert Marketing
August 7, 2008
@ 9:24 pm
Thanks for sharing this great information. I’ve also noticed similar trends when looking at my web stats. Facebook seems to be working the best for me but I have no doubt that LinkedIn could provide valuable leads if I was putting more efforts into it. Unfortunately, most of my “real life” contacts are from Quebec and LinkedIn doesn’t seem to be very present there at this point.
Shaun
January 20, 2009
@ 6:16 am
I am busy researching the value of using Social Media and how Linked-In can contribute to raising brand awareness, and then making contacts and relationships with potential clients.
How could our sales/business development team use Linked-In as a sales tool to reach potential clients? What steps will need to be put in place?
Randy
January 27, 2009
@ 11:31 am
Shaun - in my talk at SMX Long Beach, I spoke about the quickest path to glory with Linked-in. The short take is this — have the smartest people in your organization monitor the questions and answers section of Linked in. Where they can answer a question, they should participate AND link to a download on your site: a whitepaper, a guide, a report or some other helpful and relevant piece of information.
If you get really sophisticated, you can use Yahoo pipes to build a widget that searches Linked-in Q&A for multiple keywords and brings them to their attention. I hope this helps.
randy
Rob Burns
March 5, 2009
@ 6:54 am
Wonderful blog post. Thank you. Confirmed everything I have been thinking about the usefulness (or not) of various apps. Including Twitter and the amount of time I should be spending on it (or rather not)!
Having “followers” just doesn’t equate with getting real attention or interest. It’s the next big thing, but unlike yourself, few people are measuring the genuine results it brings.