Social Media Sites Are Selling Big for Their Influence but They Have Little to Do with Referral Traffic

Social media platforms are used not only to have an online presence but to promote traffic for their websites that can later help them to generate business. As a social media marketer and analyst, more of the people like to know more about their audience and how much are these audience worth. On the other hand, users are now looking for a way to keep their information as safe as possible. The only dilemma is that with the help of tracking the online usage and patterns of these social media users, analysts and advertisement managers can help them save time and make suggestions as precise as possible. Most of the people try to trick the algorithm while advertising something but the basic point is not to trick the algorithm but to learn how it works. Once the market has complete command on the working of the algorithm, this will help in bringing the best engagement and maximum results. Most of the social media platforms promise good reach, but experts say the choice of the social media platforms is not a guarantee that the user will be able to reach the desired audience and get maximum reach.

Audience Reach

Most of the platforms promise that since they have more active users they can bring in more referral audience. This is not true if we closely compare the number of active Facebook users and the views and referral audience that they generate. This is a fact that Facebook has 2.41 billion monthly active users and this is the reason it brings 924 million views per month but when we move to other platforms the gap between the active monthly users and the views it generates per month increases. A simple comparison is a fact that Twitter just makes one-third of the active users as compared to Instagram but it generates almost 6 times more views than Instagram.

Social media referral data

Similarly, according to Parsely, Google-owned platform - YouTube boasts around 2 billion active users, however when it comes to referral traffic, the world largest video search engine, sends a mere of 1.5 million viewers to other sites and blogs. Pinterest generates 25 million average view per month, while, LinkedIn produce 16 million views every 30 days.

Social Interaction Effects Referral

Social interaction or in other words, engagement plays a very important role in bringing the referral traffic. The hype of likes, comments, shares, retweets is real, this creates brand awareness and ensures that the users not only just know about the process of increasing engagement but also its impact on the brand professionally. Although, not everyone is investing in influencer marketing but according to a study 37% of the businesses are not only ready to invest but they are currently investing in the influencers market and will do it in future too. Instagram might look like a good platform for influencer market and it sure has its perks but the platforms limit the reach on its own which is the reason most of the people rely on private messages and stories. Regardless of the impact, the study also explains that Instagram brings in new traffic which means it is good for brand awareness. When compared this to Twitter, it explains that 80% of the tweets are sent by only 10% of the users which means they make have a great influence on Twitter audience. Reaching these 10% means that catering rest of the audience is easy through them.

Converting Engagement into Product Development

Days are long gone when the success of the brand was measured by the number of followers or the number of likes they had on their page. Now engagement matters more than likes, moreover, limiting the audience, sponsor post and valuating hot and cold audience also plays a very important role. Social media platforms have been designed to fit certain audience and spread the content according to the algorithm, in most cases these platforms end up limiting the audience just because of their own algorithm. A simple example is Instagram, the algorithm facilitates connections but it limits the content to images and hashtags. Wrong hashtags and wrong content section might mislead the audience. On the other hand, Twitter amplifies the voices by providing an opportunity to every user that they can make an impact with just a few words.

Read next: Nearly Half Of The Google Searches Are Zero-Click, Revealed A Recent Study
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