How Social Media Helps Website Marketing

One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.

With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.

In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.

Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.

Here is the number of visits per day:

Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239

Jan 19th - 246

Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155

Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?

The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board.  A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!

Using Linkedin To Find Customers In Your Social Network

One of the less talked about but most effective social networks is Linkedin. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which allow for business to be done but are really not focused in any one specific area, Linkedin has one focus and that focus is to help you use your network to get business done and get access to business contacts in your network.

I find that with Linkedin I focus on only having connections that I actually know or have a pretty solid knowledge of them (fellow bloggers, well known domain investors, etc). With Twitter and Facebook the filter is not always as strong. Based on this trust factor on Linkedin though it can help get things done. Let me give you a quick case study:

In my previous career I was tasked with penetrating a new industry sector, the telecommunications sector I needed to target was a tough one to crack and the customers were known to have money but be very tied to a certain set of very niche vendors and not allow "new blood" in.

Based on this finding away in would be tough and once a contact was made having a level of trust up front would be key. When a customer typically does not like to deal with new vendors and you are telling them they need to spend several million dollars with you instead of with their typical relationships that can be  a tough sell. How do you get past that?

The first thing I did was used the Linkedin search tool and searched for a specific company I had seen do a press release lately about a network decision they had made. Based on this I knew they had capital to spend and a need for network equipment. Know your customer...

After I found some key contacts in the company on Linkedin I was able to verify which contacts of mine had a direct connection to one of the executives at the target company. I was fortunate and someone I had worked with before had left the company recently but had a direct connection to a very key person. I sent a request through this person to the targeted person. This is where trust comes in, since Linkedin is founded on the basis of trust my contact verified the message and passed along a note to the other person that I was someone they should talk too.

Now I had an in, I was able to setup a presentation with the customer which lead to a succession of meetings. Where did it lead?

Well, we found out they were actually talking to a competitor of ours and were in the process of getting ready to sign a deal. But due to the timing of the contact and the quality of our product we were able to secure the deal and after just 90 days from the first initial contact through Linkedin we had a 3 million dollar purchase order.

Now, this same type of scenario can be used to get access to new potential buyers for your domain names or websites as well. Use your network.

Online Ad Revenue Drops As A Whole But Search Ad Revenue Up

I was just reading an interesting report at Adage.com concerning online advertising revenue results (based on an IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report) for the first half of the year and how the economic downturn had affected advertiser spend. I found a few of the numbers interesting in the report, numbers talk so here are a few things to point out:

• Overall Internet advertising spend dropped 5.3 percent to 10.9 billion compared to last years comparable period.
• Search advertising revenue grew by 2 percent.
• Last year search revenue accounted for 44 percent of the overall spend, this year it was 47 percent.
• Digital video ad spend was UP 38 percent.

One thing that really stuck out to me since I just left the telecommunications industry is that telecom ad spending was up 1 percent.

Now, although overall spending was down it was still positive compared to other advertising mediums such as newspaper and radio which have faced even steeper declines in advertising revenue.

Social networking sites have seen a large growth surge in time spent on the site over the first half of the year and revenue has also grown (doubled). Personally I think social media will be of concern to some as people begin to rely on their social network for references to other sites and products and as such SEO consultants and search marketing in general really have to think about what that means for their business. If online revenues doubled for search networks that tells me people are content to stay on Facebook, Twitter, or others and not head to the search engines and suddenly normal Google or Bing search becomes a bit less valuable (don't worry Google is not going anywhere but Facebook and Twitter matter more for search than people may realize).