Uselessness of Social Media

Having a social media outlet does not guarantee you of a high conversion rate and revenue stream. Social media suffers from a peculiar analytics problem. Traffic driven through ads, referrals, organic search has a high conversion rate. But traffic from social media is highly temporal. People come to see and investigate and then carry on, leaving the page. The bounce rate is very high in the case of social media traffic.



Can someone suggest ways to actually convert traffic from the social sector?

 

I find that if you have an active content feed for your social media it helps, but you also have to be sure to include links in your feed to acclimate your followers to clicking on your links. This doesn’t mean you have to spam them with affiliate links or straight up promotions. I include links to articles I find interesting & link to new posts on my blog (try to draw them over to my main site). Get them used to links & offer content of value and you’ll get them to check our links to your offers too or visit your website & sign up for your newsletter, gain a conversion that way.

 

Again it highly depends on your niche. I agree with EpicShred - you can't write only about yourself and promote your links only. Write about your partners, even your competitors sometimes, try to engage your audience in conversation and content-creation within your group/community. I have one project which gets most of it's daily traffic from FB, twitter and several local social media sites, and judging by Google Analytics, these visitors who come from social media sites spend quite a long time on the site and view 10+ pages. And they keep coming back, what is even more important.

 

Social media is looked at like a white elephant in the room by some companies. They create twitter and facebook accounts by complience with popular demands. Social media can be a fantastic marketing tool but it can also be a waste of time and resource. It all depends on the nature of the business and its clients. A firm selling legal merger and aquisition services to businesses in the petroleum industry would not benefit from having a facebook page as much as a company selling colourful headphones to teens.

The bottom line is accountability. If social media isn't improving customer retention, SEO, customer aquisition or anything else then it's a pure waste of resource. It's all about strategy and execution.

 

So far i have seen that social media works for particular categories in short it depends upon the product or services.

 

I think if you increase your number of Fan Page, participate in group discussion related to your website theme, then it will help you in getting clients.

 

I do believe not ONLY having social media, but also improving your SEO...its a combination of everything in order to increase your search engine rankings!

 

Depends on what you use the traffic for.
It's hard to get sales, but it's easier to get leads.
Each traffic source has its own benefits and drawbacks.

 

The thing about social media is tht it is not meant for direct conversion. it's for branding and help raising awareness. it does help your brand indirectly, making your brand presents more tangible to people.

If social media is useless, coca cola, ford and many big brands wont be spending so much on the social media.

 

Bounce rates are pretty high. Interesting info here. Thanks!

 

Bounce rate should be high, because facebook users don't like to go to other sites except facebook... But social networks are still very useful.

 

Absolutely agree

 

I am worried about the bounce rate too. I try to make highly informative content, that will keep people reading. I find my followers from Twiends are mostly webmasters, so if you understand the demographic, you can figure out what they might find interesting enough to stay, and perhaps buy. I've made a few sales of my social promotion services through Twitter.

 

Finally, I want to get back to my point earlier about how these endless rankings are, ultimately, doing us all a massive disservice. Why do I think that? Well, primarily because it turns all of this into a race. And as companies try and keep up with each other, they start to apply the tactics that helped company “A” get to the top of the list without realizing they have a completely different business model and culture. It always ends awkwardly. I talked a lot about the impact of corporate culture on social media previously here on this blog. It's worth revising that in the context of these lists to ask whether we should put a final nail in the coffin of endless rankings. If only.