To those of you (well, those of you who listen to us!!) that work with Page One on a regular basis, this news will come as no surprise whatsoever.
Hitwise, and in particular their Research Director Alan Long, are reporting some very interesting news out of Australia this morning. It seems that, for the first time ever, social media sites such as Facebook and Youtube actually overtook search engines with respect to number of unique visits during the week of Dec 19-26, 2009.
“While this looked like a short term lead”, wrote Long this morning, ” we are now seeing continued growth of Social Networking and Forums to now sit just 0.4% share behind Search Engines in the week ending 16 January 2010.”
Lets have a look at the actual statistics folks:
We can see clearly that these social networks are no longer the “new stuff” that no one understands just yet. They are the real deal, are sustainable, and are driving SIGNIFICANT QUALIFIED traffic to businesses every minute of every hour of every day.
The most prevalent question/objection we are still (STILL!) hearing is, “but these social sites are not relevant to business. They can’t do anything for my business.” We will be getting into some nice numbers and hard proof in our next column. IN the meantime, I have two thoughts for you to consider:
1) Dell made over 7 million dollars on Twitter ALONE in 2009. How much did you make? How about your competitor? Who’s going to take YOUR market share in 2010?
2) To our beloved B2B and Industry- type folks: Do you remember talking to us (or someone like us) in about 2003 or so? Do you remember telling us that NEVER was it possible that your potential customers were going to use the Internet and search engines to source you? No? WELL I REMEMBER!!! Obviously, that turned to be untrue, and so is the fact that social has no place in B2B or Industry. We dragged you onto the search engines, and that turned out pretty well for you. So I guess if we have to, we’ll just drag you into the Social Media world also…….TO BE CONTINUED………
