Think Facebook is just for friends?
Businesses and professionals often dismiss Facebook as a place to stay current with friends and family, not to gain business. That overlooks a great opportunity to use Facebook to drive traffic to their websites.
Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partners, two leading marketing companies, report that Facebook now accounts for 4 in every 10 referrals on the Web. That’s far ahead of email at 17 percent of traffic and Twitter at 11 percent.
The study measured the sharing and clicking habits of the more than 300 million people who pass links with a ShareThis button on over 1 million websites.
The report, released in June 2011, found that the sharing of links accounts for 10 percent of all Internet traffic and about a third of all traffic to websites. Search engines account for almost all of the rest.
The study results show that companies and professional that don’t see a purpose to Facebook are missing out on a large opportunity to generate visits to their sites. The statistics also raise the question as to what’s more effective, traditional advertising or just getting the word out there for everyone to share.