Remember, everything takes time.. time to build friends, followers, time to see a difference in visitors, time to get your website viral..
Yeah, good traffic should depend on the social networking, good content and as well as good ranking so that customers can find you easily with the keywords.
depends how you use social networks, if you work hard you can bring a lot of traffic into a site from facebook, orkut, myspace, digg, delicious, stumbleupon etc..
If you really believe this then 1) you're missing out on a VERY powerful marketing tool and 2) don't know how to use social networks effectively. If you're "spamming" then you're doing it TOTALLY wrong. If I use twitter to promote a web site, I "might" mention it one out of every 100-200 tweets. If every tweet you make is about whatever you're promoting, you are going to lose your followers because you ARE spamming. Social media is all about building communities, participating in discussions (often about mundane everyday things... things that have absolutely nothing to do with your business), making people laugh, sharing links to things that people in your "community" might find interesting and/or funny (again, more times than not having NOTHING to do with your business)... All of this you do so that WHEN you want to tweet about some site you're promoting, people will take the time to check it out. If your approach to social media is spamming then you might as well not bother.
I suppose if someone sells aftershave, or other "fast food" products and services, that may be true. For skilled craftsmanship and other high end goods, I think Facebook and the like are like scraping the bottom of the barrel for a customer base. IMO
This is where I post and say nuh uh right? Listen, the deal is that social networks have become powerful....but social media use/behavior is always changing....as are usage demographics, frequency, etc.. sysomos and marketingcharts have some decently representative data to help. I'd include direct links here...but since I got in trouble for posting links yesterday..you're on your own to find them.
One more thing. Corporate says they'll be spending over $14 billion on social media marketing by 2012. With the money comes more development, strategy, technology, etc. More and more convergence will take place and these kinds of forums will remain important. Just sayin' The Atlantic Monthly printed an encomium to social networking in 2008. Guess they got it wrong. 400 million FB users, 10 billionth Tweet. Nope, not dead and buried yet. cg (PS: I do legit social media analysis and consulting if anyone needs it.)
Social networks are good only if used properly. They are first and foremost social, which means that you should treat them just as you would a conference where you get to meet people and build relationships. If every person you meet is a person to be sold, you will end up lonely and poor - in real life and in social media.
These social networking sites had been pretty famous all over the world for all ages especially for teens, most of the people now a days are spending so much time with these sites
you can say that they work, and you can say that they don't, but fact is that if you post news on your social network account regular, you will be found by SE much more easily and often. And that is what we all want. Isn't so ?
We're a small firm of 10 or so people, all ages and all walks of life, and yet every lunchtime there is a facebook-athon - nearly everyone is involved in checking, chuckling, writing, looking puzzled, smiling, laughing, pointing, showing others theirs pictures etc. To me this is evidence that social bookmarking is not only popular its working. Better than any other form of internet interaction. How to leverage this popularity - thats the challenge, we should be discussing not whether it works but how did you make it work (or not). Clearly spamming is not popular. Creating great content is popular. What other top tips - a top 10 post on a blog would probably get me a delicious / tweet etc and TRAFFIC. What you do with that traffic is another discussion but social is the doorway to traffic.
Really now a days social networking is a very powerful tool for generating good amount of traffic. It takes time but it is a lonk term investment. I also like networking on facebook, linkedin, twitter and hi5 etc.
Social networking can be powerful if it is managed effectively. But in most of the cases it is not that much effective. So, we need to decide what is to be done when.