By Greg Hazley
A survey of thousands of online businesses, mostly in the U.S. and Europe, found that more than 30% find Facebook ineffective for driving traffic to a firm’s website and even fewer see Twitter attracting clicks.
The University of Bradford (U.K.) produced the study with software developer Intellimon, looking at several marketing tactics like press releases, social media and advertising.
“It's a real eye-opener, even for experienced online marketers,” said Intellimon CEO Paul Smithson.
The study found the typical age of users doing business online was over 50 (62%) and the most important traffic generation tool for businesses to be search engines, although only about 63% said they perform optimization, or SEO, monthly or less frequently.
About half of the survey respondents were in the U.S., with large blocs in the U.K. (16%) and Australia (9%) as well.
Source: Intellimon |
Email marketing was cited by nearly 45% of respondents as effective for driving traffic. A similar percentage cited webinars and tele-seminars as attracting interest.
While more than 56% of responding companies said they use social networking to attract consumers, nearly 23% said such tools are ineffective for driving traffic and another 9% said platforms like Facebook are “very ineffective.” Slightly less – 30% -- find social networking to be effective or very effective.
More than 64% of online businesses use Twitter and 54% see its importance increasing in the next year.
Press Releases Not Popular
Notably, only 26% said they have used press releases to generate web traffic for their businesses. Many (45%) of the businesses that have utilized the popular PR tool have been competing for up to two years and say five releases annually is the average.
More than 73% said they spend less than $100 monthly on releases, although 38% said they find releases to be effective for driving traffic. Asked about the future of press releases, 45% said they see no change in importance over the next year, while 43% think they will be more important or a lot more important down the road.
The survey, which can be downloaded here, also looked at other tactics like affiliations, article marketing and display ads.
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