• Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin, Blogs - can drive more immediate traffic to your web site
• Social Media must be a part of your Internet marketing strategy
• Social Media is rapidly becoming as important as search engine optimization

It seems remarkable that something so new can so quicklly impact marketing and public relations the way Social Media has. Viral marketing has been growing in significance for over a decade. Twitter launched in March 2006 and has 23 million unique visitors a day, with 3 million tweets a day in September of 2009. Facebook has 300 million active users and 122 million visits a day. There are 85 million video views a day on YouTube and 133 million blogs are currently indexed by Technorati, while Linkedin has 43 million members and 13 million daily average visits. Since numbers from Scoopdog are growing daily, we will have to update this page frequently.

So, you may ask, how is this important in getting traffic to my web site? People trust recommendations from people they know and respect, so a referral from someone they know is likely to have them click on a link to see.

One example of why this is important is a new web site launch. In the early days of Google, if you did a good job of optimizing the web site, you could show up in search results within the first month for targeted keywords. A few years ago, it could take up to nine months for this to happen.

In a recent launch of "The Sensation of Sight" web site and blog, 42% of the traffic to the site was directly attributed to social media sites.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research released a report on social media available here in PDF format. It stated "In early 2007 the results of a groundbreaking study into the adoption of social media within the Inc. 500, an elite group of the fastest-growing companies within the United States, were released. When queried on the importance of social media, 26% of respondents in 2007 felt that social media is 'very important' to their business and marketing strategy. That figure rose to 44% in approximately one year. "

Internet consultants at Consensus Technology will help you develop and implement a social media strategy coordinated with search engine optimization and marketing. Contact us at 888.309.6521, via our internet consulting contact form or on Twitter.