This week it was announced that Facebook had more visits than Google. Google has been the reigning king of internet traffic for much of this millennium but it now appears that Facebook’s chunk has just edged by Google. Facebook’s growth over the past few years is unprecedented and there is no question that Facebook is the defacto choice for keeping up with your friends and family throughout the world. And of course both Facebook and Google represent important channels for online marketing.
With the busy schedules of today’s marketing and sales teams, prioritization of online marketing efforts is critical to budgets and success. This news of Facebook surpassing Google provides an excellent opportunity to talk about priorities of these two industry leaders and more generally search and social media.
Facebook’s Traffic Numbers
First, let’s take a closer look at a technical aspect of the Experian/Hitwise report. The chart reads “Weekly Market Share of Visits”. The important word here is “visits”, not pageviews, and not visitors. It’s known that many people can be obsessed with Facebook. I was wondering just how obsessed, so I decided to look at my 253 “friends”. Questions about whether anyone can have 253 friends aside, what I wanted to look at was how many “visits” they made to Facebook in a week. It appears that my 253 friends made 2400 visits in 1 week. So, let’s just call that an average of 10 visits per friend. With a reported 400 million active users, we could theoretically be talking about 4 billion visits per week. Even if that 400 million number is high, or my visits per friend is high, there’s no question that Facebook gets an awful lot of visits per week.
Google’s Traffic Numbers
So, what does this mean for the newly crowned king of internet traffic as well as the dethroned giant of Google? And more importantly what does this mean for your business and its online marketing strategy? Let’s go back and take a look at Google’s numbers. From a look inside Google via Wired Magazine, the best I could find is that google gets 260 million searches per day, or about 1.8 billion searches per week. So yes, that may indeed be less than the number of visits Facebook gets per week. But let’s not shift our online marketing budget and resources over to Facebook just yet.
User Intent and User Action, Social Media vs Search
What are Google users doing? They are clicking through to other sites. They are clicking organic links and they are clicking paid links. What are Facebook users doing? They are talking about what they did/are doing/plan to do, while they also see what their friends are up to. They didn’t go to Facebook to find helpful tool and strategies for “online lead conversion tracking“. And they didn’t go to Facebook to find a tool for “managing their business’ twitter campaigns“… yet. These general tendencies might be shifting as the growth of Facebook continues. Having your business organization page within Facebook is a good first step, but it’s also important to continue to leverage the focus (via specific keywords) and volume of searches and outbound clicks when driving traffic to your website.
Focus your efforts on high quality and high quantity traffic
Knowing your audience in each marketing channel is vital. There is also a delicate balance between quantity and quality. Yes, your Facebook network may be more engaged with you, and be a more likely potential lead. But 100 targeted search visitors could be better than a good friend checking out your website. Looking back at the original image in this post. Let’s say you’re putting together a professional soccer team. Would you rather create a team from the 22 players down on the field, or the 60,000 people in the stadium? More specific to social networks and search, these estimated 4 billion weekly visits to Facebook are distributed across a lot of friend networks. Most of which you don’t have much access to (unless you’re doing Facebook ads). However, you do have the ability to quantify, budget and measure your SEO and Paid Search presence. With social media conversion tracking, as well as search tracking and reporting, why not Try Optify today to help meet the demands of your online marketing strategy.
