When social media killed Google.

SEO, search engine optimisation, is not a new term. Nearly all site owners know about it and work on it, be it in an aggressive way or just doing the minimum to get traffic coming to their site. I’ve done a lot of that for clients but started living a whole new experience with the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius as it is a niche blog. So niched that search engines do not generate much traffic. True story! This site might be the only one that works like this as nearly all my client sites have Google as the major referrer. On checking thoroughly the site’s statistics, the major element that creeps out is that Twitter is the referrer that generates most traffic.

Social Media v/s Google.

Why did Twitter go beyond Google in the traffic generation rate? Where do other social media stand in this picture? How does this happen?

There are many answers to this question but the main element is content. Building content is fine for a site, however, the main problem is visibility. This site does have the ambition to compete with major web design sites such as Smashing Magazine and the editorial line is quite different due to the fact that the content is really Mauritian-oriented. On this basis, the web designer community in Mauritius is really small hence the small amount of web searches on web design reference for Mauritius. It was therefore necessary to find other ways of getting the content to the user. So I went in for Facebook and Twitter.

Delivering the content.

If the visitor does not come to the content, the content comes to the visitor. This is the main force of social media. If your site is not very well known, your feed subscribers will not be that important. What matters the most is to get people reading the content. Facebook’s feed tool is a great tool for that. All information published on a site is directly re-published on the Facebook page. This will incite people to read that content. Ok, it’s not your site attracting visitors but if the content is what’s most interesting than actually visiting the site, it’s a good deal. Moreover, depending on those readers, many of them might be more regularly connected to Facebook that surfing the web.

Same goes for Twitter. With a tweet, the link content of a post or article is directly sent to the user. This is interesting in terms of traffic as the tool allows retweets. Starting with the number of followers you have, you just have to tweet your link to get the traffic flowing in. If among your followers, a major Twitter personality retweets your post, its all the more good for your content.

Niche industry?

Using these tools are great and are in use along with major search engines for large traffic websites. If you are, like me, in a niche, you might find that concentrating your content on delivery is a good way to generate traffic. This does not, however, replace optimising for search engines. If you check the articles on this website, all of them (except the mini-blogging ones) are search engine optimised. So the use of social media for generating traffic should not be the only way of doing it. One of the advantages of being in a niche and on Twitter is that the community might be more present there and are easier to connect with.

Future.

Social media is taking the pace and this is why search engines are massively indexing social media pages. Google has also started indexing tweets. This shows that search engines know the power of these tools and how users interact with them. In some years, these tools will either be absorbed by groups like Google or will be the base of new Internet empires.