by Matthew Montanez
I too was once a skeptic of social media’s actual ability to draw meaningful traffic to a website. On the surface, blogging appeared to simply be a method of publicizing your personal journal, lacking any real business-level value. Facebook appeared to be another MySpace-like application more about maintaining personal relationships than business relationships. Twitter appeared to be another method for those bloggers to post personal information irrelevant to anyone but themselves. Researching these applications online via tutorials and seminars turned me into a slight believer of social media’s business potential. It was only when I began utilizing these applications and measuring results myself did I become a true believer.
Since I have established my own blog, set up towards the end of August 09, it has become the number 1 entry point for traffic coming into my website. Twitter and Facebook currently contribute to 20 and 17 percent of all traffic coming into my website, respectively.
Just recently, I posted a blog about a weekend trip to San Francisco: My Trip to, from, and in San Francisco. Headlining the post, I included a photo of the city from my hotel room window. The very same day, the hotel, hotel Nikko, posted up my photo, with a link to my blog, on their Facebook wall. Traffic to my website quadrupled that very day!
There are obviously a large number of possibilities when it comes to online marketing through social media. It is highly significant for businesses to realize this now while it is still quite simple to take advantage.