Posts Tagged ‘facebook traffic’


Posted on May 20, 2010 - by

Facebook Traffic: Analyzing What’s Useful and What’s Not

Facebook Traffic: Analyzing What’s Useful and What’s Not

There is a constant struggle for online traffic and as such, many sites and blogs have implemented social sharing buttons on their sites to enable their visitors share relevant information found on the site with their friends on the social web. One of the most common buttons you will find is the “share on Facebook” button or “like” button.

How useful is Facebook Traffic?

To answer this question, we’ll need to consider the most important characteristic peculiar to many Facebook user profiles which is:

  • The typical Facebook user’s friends list is made up of mostly family, school mates and colleagues. My sure bet is that, most of these friends have un-similar interests and hobbies.

This makes sharing stuff on Facebook boring. Yes it is. Considering the fact that most visitors on your site share or “like” stuff that their Facebook friends don’t have any interest in. The end result for you is untargeted traffic.

There are exceptions where you can get some targeted traffic from Facebook and I am going to share these exceptions with you but first, let’s look into the negative traffic effects first.

Let’s both imagine this scenario:

  1. You have a website about web design and have Facebook sharing buttons on it.
  2. You write a couple of articles on web design.
  3. You get a visitor to your site who is into web design.
  4. Your visitor happens to be a Facebook user.
  5. Your visitor shares some of your articles with his friends by clicking on the “share on Facebook” button.
  6. 70%+ of your visitor’s over 200 friends happen to be his or her close relatives, school mates and colleagues who happen no to fancy web design articles.

Now with this scenario, what do you think the end result will be? Untargeted traffic! Yes, you got that right.

Untargeted traffic = Useless traffic:

That’s the formula for untargeted traffic :) . Traffic is supposed to be useful but if information on your website is shared with untargeted people, you not only receive no value, you also give your sponsors or advertisers low value if you have any.

This is because the clicks to your site (if there is any at all) do not convert because the visitors mostly have little or zero interest in your site’s stuff.

As I said before, there are exceptions.

Instances where Facebook traffic is useful:

Before I go on with this, I have to point out that even with these exceptions, getting high volumes of traffic from Facebook by depending only on the “like” or “share on Facebook button” is nothing but a dream. You need to pinch yourself to wake up and face reality. I will share the best way to promote your website on Facebook with you shortly but first,:

If your website is about different topics, you are likely to get useful traffic. Obviously, it is because people who click on your link on Facebook and get to your site have many other interests to choose from even if they just clicked on your link out of curiosity.

I found some really interesting sites and blogs out of curiosity by clicking on links my friends shared. Mostly, the articles that some of my friends share are not articles I will read but sometimes, I click on the link and find out that the site on which the shared article is posted has other articles that I find useful.

So the lesson here is that, if you write about many topics, you are sure to get converting traffic to your site because you serve a lot of interests.

The Best Way Forward with Facebook Marketing:

The best way to market your website on Facebook is to create a fan page for your business. You probably have read lots of articles about Facebook fan pages already so I will not say “me too” on that topic. If you need more information about Facebook fan pages, read the following articles:


Now, after you get your fan page, you will have to flaunt it on your website so as to entice interested visitors to join your Facebook fan page.

Your website is not the only place you can flaunt your fan page at. You can create some videos about your niche and then leave a link to your Facebook fan page inside the video. What you need to do after creating your video is to go to Tubemogul and then distribute your video across all the major video sharing websites.

People who become your fan or “like” you on Facebook are interested in your product or service. After all, clicking on “Like” is a conversion.

Once you get conversions on your Facebook fan page, it will be easier to get newsletter subscription conversions. I won’t mention sales conversions because Facebook marketing is not about hard selling.

Fan page subscribers are more targeted towards your business. This means that updating your fan page’s status with links to your website will receive far more targeted visits than just a random click from a shared link to untargeted friends.

What is your Facebook marketing strategy? What do you think social media marketing lacks? Share your thoughts with me in the comments box below.



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