Social Media MarketerBrian Clark, aka The CopyBlogger, examined the impact of social confirmation in his post “Social Proof: Herd It Through The Grapevine“.  As he explains in the article, his purposeful mispell of the word “heard” specifically highlights the  ”herd” mentality that humans can have.  We see this effect daily in our lives.  Last week, I was actually pulling out of the parking garage of a North Dallas mall and observed the center lane at a nearby stop light hosting a line of well over 75 cars.  The irony is that the other two thru traffic lanes were empty.  Yes, humans are sheep!  Back to Brian’s point, having higher numbers in terms of “retweets”, “diggs”, “comments”, and other social aspects of the “Internet” adds a sense of credibility and attractiveness to a digital asset.

The notion of social confirmation has driven bloggers to actually promote the thought of sharing.  New York Times writer Brad Stone examines the growing importance of content sharing as a means of driving Internet traffic in his article article “Share the Moment and Spread the Wealth“.  He observes the growing trend of site owners, big and small, that actively try to promote sharing of their content to increase exposure to their site.  In our experience at Orangecast, search engines are still the primary source of traffic for most websites and blogs; yet, social media links are quickly entering the top 5 referrers list for sites with authoritative content or with existing brand recognition.  In episode 12 of the Wealth Nation podcast, the CEO of web analytics upstart Woopra observed that from a sampling of their 90,000 monitored sites “50% of all the social networking referalls are coming from Facebook; 42% are coming from Twitter.”.  Co-host Cali Lewis added that traffic from social media sites varies across platforms and requires some experimenting.  ”Twitter doesn’t do anything for WealthNation.FM but Facebook is outrageous [in terms of traffic],” Lewis added to the discussion.  Still, site owners and bloggers who’s brands are less recognized or their content is more second hand in nature (like this blog) must make a time investment their presence on social media sites.  As time is at a premium for most bloggers and business owners, the million dollar question is “Where should one spend their time?”

In today’s social media landscape, there are literally hundreds of sites and services built on the premise of sharing.  Some of the more notable ones are Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Redit, and Stumble Upon.  Each of these sites requires an investment in time and even a certain level of brown nosing.  In the end, sharing is one thing; yet, action driven by click throughs should be a marketer’s goal.

When it comes to click through rates, the fact is that not all sites foster sharing and click throughs equally.  ”. . . . 18 Twitter users, on average, click on that link and visit the site. A single link to a story posted on LinkedIn, the professional social network, generates around eight visitors; Digg gets five clicks for every link posted to the site,” said Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis (source: NY Times Article “Share The Moment and Spread The Wealth“).

I posted the question to Tim Schigel on Twitter  ”@schigel What do you attribute Twitter’s click through rate as compared to Digg? Popularity or actual usage semantics and demographic?”.

Schigel tweeted, “@orangecast some platforms have sharing features that inherently promote pass along, or re-broadcast, also audience seems to make a diff.”

I agree with Shigel and will add that the pass along rates and click throughs in Twitter have nothing to do with the popularity of the site.  After all, Twitter isn’t really a site; it is an API with hundreds of platforms calling into it.  It’s flexibility promotes its use and this is the key to furthering the sharing process which exposes links to a higher number of viewers.  Unlike classic bookmarking sites (e.g. delicious.com), a Twitter message can originate from a URL, a thought, a retweet of another’s message, and more.  Furthermore, Twitter has the most flexible category taxonomy on the Internet–they are called hash tags.  Hash tags are a taxonomy mechanism that is “for the people and by the people”.  How many times have you wanted to Digg a story and you really couldn’t figure out the right category to pick from their limited list?  When the flexibility of message origin is combined with the open category taxonomy, messages can literally spiral through fragments of the Twitosphere and become exposed to tens of thousands of users instantaneously.  The drawback with Twitter is that the shelf life of the content and its associated links is very short.

Platforms such as Facebook provide a lot longer shelf life for content and links and in some cases a more captive audience.  Users go to Twitter not knowing what to expect because every 30 seconds on the site can be very different.  Facebook and its Fan Pages, on the other hand, provide a more predictable experience to a user.  In many cases, this can keep them coming back.

There is no one answer for the right social media platform.  Thus, when considering where to invest your time, consider the following additional aspects of a site and its community and ensure they match with your marketing goals:

  1. The overall demographic of the site or communities within the site (see our Facebook and Twitter ROI Article for more information)
  2. The overall receptiveness of the community to accept new members into their circles and share their information.
  3. The life span of content and associated links on a platform.
  4. SEO benefits from links on the site  (e.g. Twitter’s shortened URLs are not beneficial in SEO)

Last, a marketer should set a fixed period of time to invest in social media interaction and specifically measure the results through a web analytics program.  As with natural search traffic, consideration should be given to the overall number of referrals, their time spent on site, and conversions based on the action you’d like them to take.

As with all ventures on the Internet, there is a learning curve and a decent amount of trial and error.  Don’t be afraid to have a “controlled” failure online if you can learn from it.  As you refine your approach, you’ll be able to evaluate the ROI of your time investment and decide whether to continue to invest, consider increasing the investment, or pulling back to focus on other forms of marketing.