- The social web is huge, from Facebook to Pinterest,
when you combine them all,
it's over billions of eyeballs per year.
But, if you've been doing business on the social web
for awhile you've probably watched things become harder
and harder every single day.
I ran a study and pulled 483 companies
who all are leveraging Facebook, YouTube, Instagram,
Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
And today I'm going to show you whether or not
businesses are actually getting any traffic from social.
Hi everyone, I'm Neil Patel and today I'm going to break down
can social media still bring you
any website traffic in 2020?
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There's always a big debate as whether or not
social media is worth it for your business
in terms of traffic.
This study is conducted to help paint a better picture
of how useful social media really is for your business.
Important disclaimer, this study I focused solely
on organic traffic and not paid.
Right, from a paid acquisition standpoint
social media is really simple.
You spend a dollar, you should make more than a dollar.
That is super effective even to this day.
If it wasn't, Facebook wouldn't be worth
hundreds of billions of dollars.
Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn,
they're all worth billions of dollars
because paid ads on social media are still effective.
Sure, it's harder and harder each year,
but it's still effective.
Now let's go over social media organic traffic over time.
Let's start by looking at this chart
of social media traffic over time.
It's safe to say that the traffic has died down
over the years, and it's likely due to the fact
that social channels are bringing down organic reach.
In 2015 you can generate roughly three visitors of month
for every 100 followers.
However, now that number's
just roughly two visitors per month.
That's a 38.6% drop in organic traffic.
Now when you look at traffic by social channel,
let's first start off by looking at which channels
drive the most traffic per 100 followers.
Facebook and Instagram are somewhat
of the lowest in the chart.
Instagram really isn't a shocker
because you can't really add links to your posts.
Sure you can add links within your bio,
you could do the swipe-ups but still,
Instagram, not much of a shocker.
What is a surprise though,
is Pinterest was the winner by far,
followed by LinkedIn and YouTube.
So if you want to get the most traffic
start off with Pinterest first and then LinkedIn.
I often get asked, how often should I post content?
Well this chart may help.
In general, posting more should drive you more traffic.
However, the study shows that after eight posts a month
you'll start seeing a diminishing return.
Now this is due to the way the algorithms are set up.
The more that people engage with your content,
the more of them that'll see your future content
as you post it.
This is why it's important to only post high quality content
and not mediocre content.
If you're posting mediocre content,
yeah you may get traffic in the short run
but as time goes on you'll get less and less engagement
over time and your numbers will die down.
Now on the flip side,
if you're posting truly engaging content,
let's say like the Gary Vee's
or the Grant Cardones of the world,
you can post multiple times a day,
but most people aren't posting content that's that engaging.
It's hard to have a true following year-round
and constantly filming.
For that reason, if you're going to post and you have that,
sure post as much as you can, but for most of us,
including me, limit the number of times you post
to the content that is super high in quality.
If you can produce five amazing pieces
of high quality content a week, then do five.
If you can do 20 a week, do 20.
If you can only do five a month, then do only five a month.
If you can only 10 a month, then only do 10 a month,
but limit your number based on the quality of the content
that you're producing.
Now let's look at social channels
and which ones prefer videos.
So you're probably wondering,
hey, which networks prefer videos?
Well, it's easy to see that Instagram produces
the most amount of views by far,
followed by LinkedIn and YouTube.
However, it's important to note
that Instagram autoplays videos,
while YouTube is much more picky
about what they really consider a video view,
which is why you're seeing the disparity in that chart.
Even on Facebook, as you scroll in your feed,
you'll see videos automatically playing without sign on,
same with Instagram.
YouTube is not like that, so a view on YouTube
is really a view, while a view on Instagram and Facebook
isn't really necessarily a view.
Now while it's important to post video content
on all channels, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube
should be your top focus.
By doing YouTube SEO you can also continually
see video views over time climb,
while with the other channels, typically when you post
a video it'll do well within the first few days or week
and then it dies down.
Now let's look at how well live videos perform
on each channel.
The results are similar,
with Instagram and YouTube leading the pack.
The big takeaway here is live videos don't generate
as many views as regular videos
and the main reason is is, and this is likely
that non-live videos can be optimized for SEO much more
than let's say live videos.
And if you're doing videos,
whether they're live or non-live,
you should use tools like Ubersuggest.
You can type in any keyword within Ubersuggest
and it'll show you all the other relevant, related keywords
that you can be going after.
The next thing I want to look at,
how much revenue is generated from social traffic.
So here's a percentage of revenue that each business
has generated from organic social media traffic
over the past five years.
Although it has been declining over the last few years
the numbers are finally starting to flatten out.
The decline likely isn't solely due to algorithms
getting tougher, but that businesses are diversifying
their marking approaches to omnichannel approaches.
This way you can combat it and continually generate revenue
from social media.
Keep in mind, over the years,
more and more social media platforms
have gotten more popular,
which then gives you more opportunities to monetize.
So the big takeaway,
social media is still a force to be reckoned with.
On average, you'll receive two visitors a month
for every 100 followers,
and as you scale your follower count,
so will your visitor count as well.
In general, if you need help with your social media traffic,
check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital.
If you have any questions leave a comment below
and I'll answer it.
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Thank you for watching.