Social Media Traffic, Quantity or Quality?

How important is high quality social media traffic? Over the past couple of years I have been involved in several Web 2.0 Social Media PR and Marketing campaigns, which have similarities to Web 1.0 campaigns. Traditional web marketing campaigns rely on a large number of people being funneled through a URL to view an ad or web page, to support a conversion model. The goal is that if enough people view the ad, or content, that this sheer traffic volume will translate into conversion (revenue, brand awareness, etc). Using industry standard analytics you then try to answer business questions, such as, did you sell more product or services during the campaign time-period, or is the target audience aware of our brand?

Effective social media advertising requires a different approach, since raw numbers can be meaningless, and can skew or distort the analytics, and return a false positive. For example, if your conversion model is designed to build a fan base in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, which in turn is routed to your web site to generate traffic, you may discover that even though your fan and traffic numbers have increased, this did not result in additional sales of your services or products, or conversion of the traffic. This is a result of relying on traffic volume to overcome a poorly executed traffic and distribution plan, which was not properly filtered through a targeted and geo-located demographic traffic sourcing model. Or possibly, weak business models, which do not encourage or motivate your audience to go the “Next Step”, through incentive promotions, such as, contests or coupons.

Web 2.0 Social Media PR and Marketing campaigns require high quality traffic, not quantity, which will have a positive impact on your business goals and measurements of success, resulting in a great ROI, and supports your conversion models. In order to improve the probability of success of your Web 2.0 Social Media PR and Marketing campaign, and develop high quality traffic, you will need to establish your business goals, and answer one question: What are you trying to achieve?

Business goals, which support high quality social media traffic:
1) Conversion: Encouraging your fans to do something. Contact you, sign-up for a services, purchase a product, or join a conversation?
2) Revenue: Did your social media campaign add to the bottom line, and do your analytic models clearly indicate this? For example, when you run a social media campaign for one week, your promoted product or service revenue increases by 5% to 10%.
3) Targeted crowd sourcing: Finding and validating your geo-located demographic traffic sources. This is gold standard to continuous quality traffic growth.
4) Engagement: Illicit feedback from your fans and followers. Did they comment, rate, share, or Like your content?
5) Awareness: Promote your brand and products. Do fans recognize your brand and read your PR articles? Do they share and Like your content?
6) Retention: Increase the length of a visit, and number of visits and page views. Did you increase the page views and fan visit time? What was the bounce rate? How often do fans return?
7) Key Influencers: Gather influential fans and followers who can help spread your message. Did you gather any influencers or partners who are sharing your message?
8) Viral Sharing: Encourage your fans to virally your content. Did your fans share your content? How much and with who? What motivates them to share?
9) Content and Message: Well written quality content and messages with proper SEO will support all the previous business goals.

Your Web 2.0 strategies and tactics, which drive quality social media traffic, should stem from your business goals, and should be supported with viable tactics and measurements of success. Building high quality social media traffic and the associated supporting business strategies and goals can take months, and is something every company should strive for, constantly maintain, and invest in. But, this effort is worthwhile, and should not be dismissed for mass volume traffic solutions, which deliver the traffic, but not the results. As well, exploring new social media technology to help improve connecting and engaging with the target audience.

If you would like more information on analyzing, developing, deploying and maintaining your corporate social media business models, and Web 2.0 PR and Marketing strategies, please contact Steve Cohen at (905) 330-3570, stevecohen@electriceffect.com, or visit the Electric Effect web site at http://www.electriceffect.com