Social media has long been talked about in the Internet marketing world as the ultimate replacement for Google and I was somewhat skeptical about it in the early days. However, today as Google has become arguably the most involved and expensive promotion medium and social has become mainstream globally, it makes sense that we start looking at the latter with a lot of hope.
Let’s compare the pros and cons of Google vs Social media as a promotion medium.
Google pros:
- Targeted traffic
- Cheap and reliable once you establish yourself
Google cons:
- Very hard to promote and can be very expensive time-wise and money-wise
- Traffic volume can be limited depending on the keywords you rank
- Unreliable unless you have established your authority
Social media pros:
- High traffic volume
- Relatively cheap and easy to get
- Doesn’t require a lot of effort once you’ve established your social accounts
Social media cons:
- Un-targeted traffic
- Harder to sustain
Comparing the cons and pros it comes down to the effort required to get enough traffic to convert it to whatever offers you promote. And considering how Google is getting more and more difficult to compete in, social media is definitely looking like a more attractive option. We get a lot less targeted traffic, yes, but there’s certainly a lot you can do with those extra thousands of views per day.
Allow me to illustrate:
In this picture you see the traffic of one of my niche sites, and you can see the spikes in traffic that social media promotion results in. And even considering the site only earns from Adsense, those spikes result in significant increase in earnings.
Now, before you go running to promote your site in Social networks, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- You have to know your audience and what goes viral, what content and what headlines attract attention
- Social traffic is niche specific – different niches will result in different volumes of traffic
- You have to build social followers but you can do it as you go too, you can boost your social presence by buying into it too (i.e. Facebook ads, Fiverr, etc.)
Conclusion
We won’t drop Google completely anytime soon, but as the mainstream user behavior changes, it makes sense to shift promotion effort to the medium were you get the easier access to the crowd. And today it’s social media, not Google.