Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Local Search Optimization, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Print Media, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, Small Business Web Development, Tech News, geo domains, journalism, local search, local seo, newspaper closings, newspapers closing, rural advertising, social media
During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.
We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.
A couple examples:
- While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
- A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.
What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.
Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.
Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....
Hi Bruce, Are you getting search reaching a Facebook Fan or Facebook Group page? Or is this from Facebook advertising?
Also, do you actively network on Facebook, or drive traffic to Facebook from other sites? My impression is that it is difficult to network on Facebook without using a personal profile, and having that profile clearly associated with the group or fan page. Just yesterday I posted some of my frustrations on my blog.
Most of the search traffic is from my personal profile, I have not used facebook advertising since the beginning of the launch of the http://facebook.com/missourime page.
I really do not actively network on Facebook other than creating fan pages for specific sites.
The only way I drive traffic to it is by having facebook badges on the sites associated with the fan page, or as in the case with this blog, a link to my profile page. Is that what you were asking?
Yes, that is the question. What I am asking myself is why people would want to drive traffic away from their own blog onto third party Facebook when Facebook doesn’t offer any extra tools to interact with the people that you send there.
You could say that they you will attract new Facebook fans as you will appear in the feeds/on the page of those people, but I don’t see evidence that this networking effect works. Do you?
I am going to be experimenting with Facebook, but so far the site has demonstrated that it is good for connecting to old friends and selling online games that rebill you mercilessly. This idea that you get access to 350m people – does it really work? Maybe more for advertising that organic networking?
One benefit of acebook.com/missourime is that you get a PR4 back to your site, but Facebook isn’t going to monetize off the back off small SEO-savvy companies using it for link-building.
Wow, this article actually made me laugh out loud. Correct me if I am wrong. You are comparing advertising in the yellow pages to advertising on Facebook? Really? That’s funny. Good luck selling your customers on that and good luck keeping your customers with that.
WOW Christine, you make me laugh out loud, read the article at the top, i said this was to be two blog posts but i made it one, at no point did I compare the two. Good try…..
They were never compared , never would i sell Facebook as a replacement for the Yellow Pages, sheesh.
Ah, my apologies.
NP:)
@Crowdmanage – The great thing about fan pages is that you drive people to your website that are fans to see more content, i.e. if a restaurant has a coupon special there is a chance that people are not actively going to the site to look for it, BUT if they are fans they may see a link to it posted to the feed.
On the other side, you can use a link from your site to the fan page to gain fans which means they are interested in your site, then when you post links they are more likely to be driven back to the site even if it was out of their mind.
It works.
Wow! This proves that the traditional methods of advertising are undergoing a paradigm shift. The only point I want to expand on here is we can not count out the effectiveness of the Yellow Pages. They had enough insight to develop both yellowpages.com and yp.com, which tells me that they are not going to give up without a fight.
Either way, this proves that online advertising is here to stay and we haven’t come close to truly tapping this market. There are still a number of revenue streams which have yet to be tapped. Onwards!
Jason, you are so right.
And YP has done a good job with their online sites, but they keep pimping (used that word for you) print if they call.
BTW, your comment went to spam, sorry it took so long to approve:)