Are Social Media Visitors More Loyal Than Search Visitors?

October 30, 2009

By Taylor Pratt

As social media continues to be the buzz around marketing circles, it’s important to keep in mind the overall goal of a marketing strategy: conversions. Yes, everyone is on Twitter and Facebook. The question you should be asking is, “what can my company expect from a Twitter or Facebook visitor?” Is social media worth more of an investment than search engine marketing (SEO, PPC or both)?

A new study by Chitika suggests social visitors are more loyal than search visitors. eMarketer released its own study earlier this month that agrees with what Chitika found.

Chitika studied 33 million uniques across its publisher network last month and used the criteria of four or more visits over the course of a week to indicate visitor loyalty. The best performers, which I found to be surprising, were Facebook and Digg. (Digg is a social sharing website where users can submit blog posts, articles, videos, images and websites that they think would interest other people on the site.)

What is interesting about Digg and Facebook users being as loyal as this study reports is that, traditionally, social media visitors would come and go. Now it appears social media users have become stickier and are actually taking action on the websites that they visit.

This has significantly improved the value of social media users. In years past, social media visitors were used as a means to improve search engine rankings. While that still true, social media users are now converting and becoming brand enthusiasts.

Keep in mind that this study won’t neatly apply to every website’s visitors. In fact, I’m a little surprised that one in eight Google visitors return to the website only four or more times in a week. Considering that Google sent 76% of the traffic in the study, even with the lower retention rate, there are still more loyal visitors to be had from the search engines. But, as Chitika puts it, if you had the option of sending 1,000 visitors to your site from Google or Facebook, for loyalty, Facebook is a better bet.

Finally, don’t take this information as a suggestion to pull search engine marketing dollars and invest them in social media. The key to marketing your site successfully is a balanced approach. This Internet marketing industry moves fast, especially in social media, but people will always use the search engines. Google isn’t going anywhere in the near future. Search engines will continue to evolve and will continue to be an integral part in every Internet user’s life. On the other hand, we have no idea how much longer people will be putting up with Twitter.