If you want to know if social media traffic is worthwhile, or not, I recommend attending the free online Social Media: Should You Digg It? class. I sat in on today’s presentation and found it informative and insightful, especially when Matt Bailey delivered his statistical information.
This class is part of the ClickTracks Virtual Classroom Series: Online Marketing & Web Analytics. In today’s one hour offering, hosted by the charming John Marshall, (love his British accent) with Search Engine Guide’s Editor-in-chief, Jennifer Laycock and SiteLogic’s, Matt Bailey as presenters, social media marketing is discussed.
Because there is another day to sit in on the class, I won’t cover all the juicy stuff. Suffice it to say the information is not skewed as a social media love-fest. Jennifer delivers a highly detailed overview of what social media is, how it works and provides some demographic information on the types of audiences each social media website caters to. Matt invests his time into analyzing traffic data. He wants to know if the bombardment of traffic is worthwhile or provides any residual benefits.
His conclusions are interesting and may surprise you.
Do you know what types of sites bring you the most valuable traffic? Do you know why? Should you market to social media sites and if so, how? What works? What won’t work? Why?
Interestingly, while one social media bookmarking site, Digg, shuns search engine marketers by banning anything submitted by many in the SEO industry, it is this industry that is teaching people about social media by helping them understand its users, what they want and what they do. It’s not with the expectation that now that you know, you can go out and manipulate social media for your own marketing purposes. This presentation shows how doing that, on purpose, can bring wrath and also bad publicity or a negative impact on sales.
Matt and Jen approach social media with curiosity, research, evaluation and a willingness to understand interactive websites. When does it work for you? When does it not?
The presentation runs again tomorrow. It is free. Be sure to read the directions and give yourself about 10 minutes lead-time for installation and make sure you have MSIE. It doesn’t work with Firefox. They’ll email a transcript too.
Virtual classroom: Social Media: Should You Digg It? – March 27, :00 am PT / 10:00 am ET / 3:00 pm UK.
