How Facebook Can Amplify Your Business: Part 2

In How Facebook Can Amplify Your Business: Part 1, we recommended a highly original video by Rand Fishkin (of Moz) that showcases Facebook’s power over digital marketing.

Rand is one of the most well respected SEO and social media gurus out there, and he’s been studying referral traffic trends for over a decade.

But what the hell is “referral traffic”?

When another company, like Google search or Facebook, sends people to your website, that’s called referral traffic.

When you’re scrolling through your Facebook wall feed, and you see an intriguing article, click on it, then get taken to an external website to read that article, Facebook just sent that website your referral traffic.

For most businesses, ranking well in Google searches is a big deal, because the majority of their referral traffic comes directly from Google. But a surprising number of people don’t realize how much Facebook has grown; even though Facebook is still way behind Google in terms of referral traffic, Facebook sends an incredible amount of traffic to websites across the internet, and it’s definitely valuable to know how to use Facebook well when you’re trying to promote your business online.

In Rand’s ‘Driving Traffic from Facebook’ video blog post, based on stats from earlier years and Rand’s highly educated guess on projected growth, he estimates that while Google is sending 9-18 billion referrals a day to websites across the web, Facebook is now sending 1.8-3.6 billion referrals to websites daily.

To put it into perspective, Facebook is now sending more people to websites across the globe than YouTube, Bing & Yahoo! combined. Daaaaamn, Facebook – you got game.

Rand’s video concludes with a list of tips on how to optimize your social posts by learning about your audience, what kinds of posts typically do better than others, and when it’s smart to inject some cash via boosted posts.

At High Point, we’ve known the value of social media for a long time, but in our opinion, it’s never been dug into numbers-wise and put into words so efficiently. It’s always awesome to hear that the strategies we’ve been implementing for our clients to see results have also been working for businesses across the country, and that there are direct stats that back up we’ve known to be true for years.

While there are still a ton of mysteries about how social media works and it’s next to impossible to to peg an accurate ROI on it (FB keeps its algorithms on lockdown so nobody can game the system), now we know that Facebook is quickly creeping up on Google as far as how it’s been successfully giving referral traffic to other websites.

Referral traffic is just part of an online strategy. If the rest of your website is a mess, all the referral traffic in the world won’t help your business. But any time you have a strong website objective & you’re able to strategically drive user site traffic back to your site, there’s huge value waiting to be discovered in social media.

If your company isn’t doing Facebook confidently or isn’t doing it at all, The High Point might be able to help. Contact us, and let’s grab a beer (or coffee, whichever is more your style) and we’ll talk about your business.