in this video I want to share with you a surprising lesson that I picked up or learnt
fairly recently only in the last few weeks
and it has to do with social media sites and marketing or digital marketing and the
value of the various social media sites to a small business owner a guy like me
or perhaps a guy like you or a girl like you who is trying to develop a business
grow a business grow a brand or whatever and they try and use social sites which is
perfectly understandable to grow the brand grow the business grow a client
base generate leads and so on in December 2019 today is the 1st of
January 2020 but last month just over the Christmas period I decided to have a
look at my Google Analytics to see exactly where my site traffic website
traffic was coming from what sites were delivering the most traffic before I go
into that and before I explain or give you the breakdown we all have our
favorite sites we all have a particular view perhaps of for example Facebook
and you might think that Mark Zuckerberg for example and Facebook generally have a
fairly loose lax attitude to privacy for example and you may have seen him
being questioned by the various committees in the United Kingdom and in
the United States about privacy rights of users of Facebook and so on you might
also have a view about Twitter and the use of Twitter to spread hate speech and
discrimination and incitement to hatred and so on you may have a particular view
about Instagram or YouTube or indeed any other site but the surprising thing that
I found was not so much that but what I found was when I looked at the data and I
looked at the evidence of the traffic coming to my websites from the various
social sites when I broke it down what I discovered that I needed to put aside my
particular favorites or my particular prejudice
about sites and look at the evidence and it is kind of frightening because I don't
have any huge love for Facebook I don't have any great love for Mark Zuckerberg
we're gonna look at the evidence when I looked at the data and the traffic that
has been driven to my websites from Facebook it was eye-opening and it
varies between depending on my particular site I've a number of sites
business and legal dot i e employment rights ireland dot com
but the employment rights ireland dot com site that's a site of mine which deals with employment law in
Ireland and ninety-one percent of my social site social traffic comes from
Facebook ninety-one percent the next best is
LinkedIn at six percent that is absolute massive difference business and legal dot
ie that's my general solicitors website which contains all sorts of information
and so on about Irish law and business and so on again facebook gives me 72
percent of my social traffic whereas the next best is YouTube fourteen percent
seventy two percent fourteen percent go on down then to the next one and it's 58
percent Facebook 30 percent LinkedIn and the next one Facebook 50 percent YouTube
forty percent the bottom line is the surprising lesson that I learned was
that you need to look at the evidence look at the data set aside your
prejudices your biases your favorites when it comes to making a good sound
rational analysis of where you want to spend your time and your effort because
social media marketing digital marketing generally is time consuming and you
can spend money or you can spend time but you're gonna spend something in
order to market on these platforms which they appear to be free and they are to
a great extent but there is a certain element of selling your soul to
the devil when you do business with them but having said that Facebook is an
absolute behemoth in terms of delivering traffic to me and to my business and
getting people to ring and making enqueries generate leads make appointments
and basically generate business generate clients for me you mightn't think it but
Facebook is an absolute Colossus and that's the surprising conclusion I came
to when I looked at the various sites that deliver me traffic as I say you
might have your own favorite you might like Instagram you might like
YouTube you might like you know on this like Facebook but you would be
ignoring Facebook at your peril and between the organic reach that you might
get and you might complain about but the opportunity with Facebook and
advertising is enormous anyway the lesson from this video from me from my
perspective is that whatever your favorites may be look at the data look
at the evidence then decide what's best for your business on a personal level
clearly you can spend as much time as you like and on each site you like it's
up to yourself but if you are making a business based decision or decision
around your business you make sure to have a look at where the traffic to your
site is coming from and your Google Analytics to tell you this and you'd be
surprised perhaps as to the volume that's coming from Facebook hope you
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