Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [199]
Of course, not all social media can be grouped in the same generalization. Sites that have links from discussion forums and YouTube experience highly engaged visitors from those sources. Although not as highly engaged visitors as visitors from blogs and online news sources, they are engaged, the context is substantially high, and there is slightly more competition. Discussion forums are prime marketing research areas, because active forums contain hundreds of thousands of members who actively discuss products, companies, industries, and all in very niche topics. In forums, links to websites are typically from one member to another making a recommendation (see Figure 16-11).
Figure 16-11: Discussion forums provide highly relevant and personal recommendation links.
YouTube is able to provide similar types of engaged visitors but by an entirely different method. Visitors from YouTube were first attracted by the content of the video and have either clicked the link in the video description or clicked the link in the company YouTube profile page. Either way, there was an active attraction to the content of the video, resulting in the visitor wanting to know more about the company, the product, or the subject matter.
Search visitors, as mentioned earlier, are in a unique state, because they are the ones determining the context of the link from their search term. There is also a regular number of links on the search results page, creating a very competitive environment for the searcher’s attention. Based on these two factors and in comparison to other visitor sources, search visitors tend to be in the middle of the engagement pyramid. They are a valuable source of visitors, but visitors from highly contextual links still tend to convert better, stay longer, and read more. However, the number of visitors from search is typically much higher than that of links.
At the bottom of the engagement pyramid are the visitors from social news and Twitter. This is not to say that this is a very low-quality or bad source of visitors. What this shows is that in comparison with other visitors from other sources, social news and Twitter bring in very low engaged traffic, mainly because the context of the link tends to be very low and the competition for their attention is very high. Both sources receive many links to choose from in a day, because there are thousands of social-news articles being promoted in a day, and whichever is available when they view their news stream or Twitter feed is one that grabs some level of interest. The context of articles in the feed is very low, because the subject matter is so vast, depending upon who you may be following and what piques your interest at the time. A Twitter or social-news feed contains thousands of links to articles, with no consistent context. Because of this, the expectation level is very low, and the engagement is low as well. It is simply based on the amount of expected information and the little bit of context provided with the link (see Figure 16-12).
Figure 16-12: Twitter links sometimes contain little context for the link, resulting in a lower visitor engagement.
Based on these comparisons, which you should be performing on your website regularly, you can better judge what kind of visitor you need and what will be the best links to develop those kinds of visitors. If high-volume visitors are the need, then social media and Twitter would provide the best source of high-volume visitors, based on this behavior. If your desire is for more high-quality, high-conversion visitors, then a campaign of online PR, targeting news sites and high-profile bloggers, would be the key to building those high-context, low-competition