Sharing traffic on the web and its impacts for internet marketers

Posted: Jun 09, 2011
Author: WordJack Media

Trending this week on digg, was this techcrunch article indicating that 38% of sharing traffic on the web is a result of shared facebook links! A pretty amazing stat - staggering in fact - but let's have a quick think about the impacts for small businesses and internet marketers:

Firstly, what's sharing and referral in web marketing?

As a really simple rule, all your traffic as a website owner will come from on of these 3 sources:

1. search (search engine results that people click),

2. referral (when they're on a site, and there's a link to your site, and someone clicks on it), or

3. organic (when they go direct to your site by typing in the URL or selecting it in their bookmarks!).

So sharing is that second source of traffic, and it's a massive opportunity for any internet marketer.

Some website traffic comes from referrals....so what?

Well, think about the relative effort people put into search engine optimization these days! That's where they are spending tonnes of effort (and money in a lot of cases) to increase their traffic from source 1 (above). True, the article indicates this is still by far the "king" when it comes to traffic sources, but let's look at the growing opportunity for web marketing here

Great example of Social Media optimization

So I've always thought this term of social media optimization was a term invented by internet marketing firms and didn't 100% know what it covered. But here's a real example! If there is a real interest in clicking on links shared by frriends on facebook, then no internet marketer should ignore the opportunity that comes from creating great content (interesting/funny articles, videos, etc) and posting it to your wall, where followers of your brand may pick it up and share it with their frinds!

Implications for internet marketers

To sum it up in a short and concise manner; you cannot be ignoring or neglecting social media in your marketing plan. Twitter and facebook are clearly key channels for getting referral traffic to your site. Engage with followers of your brand by giving them links to great and interesting info...it will pay off in these key ways:

1. more people checking out your article/blog/video (whatever is on the end of your link)

2. more of THOSE people sharing with their friends/contacts

3. more people following you and finding interest in your comments

4. cycle continues at 1 again