Social Media - Is it important to small business?

// May 12th, 2009 // Social Media Marketing

In my first post of this short series I layed out 4 Key tactics that I will be discussing alot here.  Those KEY tactics again are:

  1. Search Marketing - Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing
  2. Social Media  - Social Media Optimization & Social Media Monitoring
  3. Video Marketing - Use of video to tell stories and make visual points.
  4. Analytics & Metrics - Use of analytics tools to evaluate and measure what is happening on your web property.

Today I want to touch on some of the key benefits of social media.  First off, almost 96% of the traffic that has come to my brand spanking new site is the result of social media activity.  Just take a look at this graph.

traffic-sources

Yes direct traffic shows 48.85% and Twitter shows 23.04% but, the majority of directs are from my Twitter announcement on April 28th that the new site was up for everyone to come view.  Thus, this announcement was syndicated into Facebook and FriendFeed (see the spike).

Now, I know this is a very small amount of traffic but, what this graphic clearly shows you is that the practice of using social media was able to generate some traffic and not to mention FREE awareness.  Of course, I just need to keep optimizing my social media practice and build more interactivity into my site.  By being more active within these  communities and adding value — actually building relationships — I hypothesize that more regular traffic will continue to grow.

Let’s also consider the following graph that shows me something interesting - can you see it?

peak-traffic-times1

Of the total page views, it looks as if peak traffic times are during most people’s lunch hour and best at 2:00.  So, if I really want to share something with my network of friends it appears I can reach most people at 1 or 2 PM.  Maybe its time for another social experiment like the one Ryan Kelly performed over at Pear Analytics?  Although this time let’s add some social media power.

Since I am friends with Ryan, let me first contact him and propose that we 1) use Hootsuite to send out a timed Tweet and 2) that we both use the power of our social networks and 3) enlist the help of the #pane network  (a LinkedIn Promotion & Networking Group for Twitter Users).

Just to quickly recap, two of the cool benefits of social media are 1) it can help you bring awareness to something cost efficiently and 2) it can provide you an opportunity to engage people quickly and interactively in many interesting ways.  Thus, social media has a way of bringing new light and opportunities to help us learn more about our customers, their interests and engagement or activity levels with us.

What do you think about this?

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