By Andrew Smith from Generating relevant traffic to a website still remains one of the key goals of digital marketing. The basic channels of search (organic and paid), display advertising, and email continue to occupy the minds of most digital marketers. Social media is also assumed to act as a powerful traffic driver. But are the days of social as a way of delivering significant web traffic over? Is “content shock” now truly with us?
“I’ve been failing at social media marketing.” That’s how Buffer’s Kevan Lee introduced his recent blog post, We’ve Lost Nearly Half Of Our Social Referral Traffic in the last 12 months. This would be a bold admission for any social media marketer. But for one of the leading providers of social media tools, and no slouches at promoting content via social, it was a rather extraordinary confession. The numbers speak for themselves. Compared to the previous 12 months, social referral traffic to the Buffer blog dropped across the board:
- Twitter down 43 percent.
- Facebook down 53 percent.
- LinkedIn down 45 percent.
- Google+ down 72 percent.
Year on year, the Buffer blog is receiving around 100,000 less visits via social.
Why Has There Been Such A Social Traffic Decline?
As Lee rightly points out, there could be a whole host of reasons why social media traffic is dropping. The one possibility that clearly presents the biggest challenge is that social media itself is changing and Buffer simply hasn’t yet figured out how to address the apparently changing behavior of social media users (or the changing nature of the main social media platforms themselves). One obvious suspect for Buffer (and other’s) social media traffic decline is the fact that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all to some degree attempting to keep people within the platforms rather than directing them elsewhere. For example:
- Twitter recently launched Moments, which is intended to to keep you immersed in “the moment” but with the practical outcome of making it difficult to click away from Twitter.
- Facebook is gradually rolling out more instant articles to keep users in the app (and apparently these instant articles get shared mored than old-fashioned links to third-party content).
- Reddit has even created a sister site, Upvoted, to capture some of its own traffic that usually gets curated by BuzzFeed.
But Is This Necessarily A Bad Thing?
Is it simply a case of accepting that social media isn’t going to send referral traffic in the way it has in the past and making sure that brand exposure and engagement is achieved on the social platforms themselves via great content? This begs the question whether even great content is good enough these days. This is partly down to the ever increasing amount of content being published everywhere today. Prominent social media blogger Mark Schaeffer predicted back in January 2014 we would soon see the imminent arrival of “content shock” – the emerging marketing epoch when exponetially increasing volumes of content intersect our limited human capacity to consume it. And as the recent the recent Moz/Buzzsumo survey showed, the vast majority of content created gets neither shared nor linked to.
It Isn’t Just Social Media That Has Problems
Blogging isn’t what it used to be either. Prolific blogger Mitch Joel recently posted an article, The End Of Blogging? His conclusion, however, didn’t mean he was giving up creating content. He was simply acknowledging that content has to go where the audience is – namely, on the social platforms themselves.
What Does This Mean For Digital Marketers?
There are a couple things to consider.
- Keep a close eye on referral traffic via social. If Buffer’s experience is anything to go by, then it would be foolish to automatically assume that social can be counted on to drive ever increasing levels of site traffic.
- Good content alone is probably not enough to gain attention and engagement directly on social platforms themselves. Not least of which is the fact that brand content now has to compete with natively published material from Premier League content creators in the shape of major media outlets.
As Moz’s Rand Fishkin has already pointed out, good unique content needs to die. Content today has to be at least 10x better than everything else it conceivably competes with.
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