While I was looking into this research, I found some numbers that amazed me. According to research by Knowledge Networks only 16% of the Internet users can be influenced by ads on social sites. While 83% of the Internet users between 13 and 54 years old participate in social media, uses less than 4% social media regularly for product orientation!  These numbers are very intriguing, this would mean that a very low percentage of users are open to incentives on their websites.  These numbers would suggest that the traditional way of advertising in social media is less profitable than I thought because 84% of the users do not read the ads.
Interesting that your findings are so low, Matt. I’ve had over 53% traffic from organic traffic on Facebook, and have yet to pay for any ads. Maybe I’m tracking a different paradigm?
Ernest O’Dell
Guerrilla Internet Marketing
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ernest-ODell/182260364898
Ernest,
Thank you for your feedback. I will definitely look at these numbers and may adjust my findings. All this data is very helpful in understanding the process and the effectiveness of the different networks.
Ernest, Matt,
Both of your observations make sense to me. Ernest is talking about organic traffic generated from social networks and Matt brings up an example of paid advertising on the social network.
Organic traffic levels should be proportional to the size of your network and rise and fall with the new posts and profile updates that then get distributed throughout the network to all your friends and friends of your friends, etc. The more friends you have the more traffic you can generate. Just be careful not to over-spam your friends :)
Matt is talking about paid advertising on a social network like Facebook – completely different animal, it’s a type of disruptive advertising that has to take a user away from what he/she is doing and get them to click on an ad. So 16% influence rate sounds pretty good actually.
Thank you Ed for your clarification(s). While my traffic from inside the FB “cloud” doesn’t have much effect on my traffic — because it’s on the “profile” side of FB, the “fan page” side gets outside of the FB cloud into the network and ends up indexed — usually within seconds.
Maybe I was just reading apples when Matt was talking about oranges (or vice-versa). :)
However, I have experienced a noticeable “spike” in the last couple of weeks with the growth in my analytics, traffic, and addition of “fans” to my various pages… AND — the unusual increase in friend requests on the regular side of FB.
I’ll continue to track this and see if I can make any sense out of it and get back with you two.
Regards,
Ernest O’Dell – Guerrilla Internet Marketing and Questar TeleCommunications
Thanks for the update Ernest! More traffic is good. There’s a lot of buzz out there about using the social media to drive traffic. But as you know it’s not enough to just set up Facebook and Twitter accounts and wait for the traffic to roll in. You need to be active in the whole SM thing to make it work. Sounds like you’re on the right track.