Social Networking - referring value

Posted by: Alex Charraudeau, Web Consultant 16 Sep 09 - 6:24PM | 4MAT | Recruitment | Social Media | World Wide Web

Another day another statistic about how fantastic Facebook is or how tremendous Twitter is. Well if you aren't already sick to death of them here are a few more...

A recent study by Hitwise shows that social media sites (not just your Facebooks and your Twitters, but the whole genre) are now the second biggest referring sites after the search engines (see full article). Does this mean that Facebook will soon take the place of Google? No it doesn't, but what it does mean is that content shared on sites like Twitter and Facebook is going to get seen by someone.

This gives us three main things to think about:

How do we get our message across to the people who need to see it?
How do we track where traffic to our site is coming from?
Is social media making us any money?

The answer to the first question is fairly straight forward. You need a social media strategy which explains how you are going to interact with people online. This can either be by you actively pushing your message across, or by listening to what other people have to say and reacting to them.
And the second? Well you need an analytics package. Most standard packages will give you some idea as to where your traffic is coming from.
The third one is little more complicated. If your analytics package isn't comprehensive enough you will not really be able to tell the value of your marketing. But with the right tools...

It is essential to track users entering your site, recording where they came from and what they have done. If at the end of it you can ascertain whether they become an application or a CV dropped off then brilliant. If you can tell if they have been placed then you are on to a winner and you can actually calculate your return on investment. Furthermore you can learn which channels of digital marketing are profitable and which are not.

If you would like to discuss how best to market and / or analyse your recruitment website please feel free to get in touch.

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I think you're spot on Alex, creating a strategy around social media is the key - rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon of social media and then annoying followers/fans/potential candidates. The media hype is pushing companies to open social accounts, but potentially misuse of someones social space could be more of a deterrent than an attraction to use a compnay's services.

Posted by: Kieron, Date 17 September 2009, 10:27AM

Following this blog post I came across some additional statistics regarding Facebook as a referring site. These stats relate directly to Capital One. Please see the link below: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2009/09/capital_one_and_facebook.html

Posted by: Alex, Date 24 September 2009, 08:05AM

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