People have their favorite social networks. And businesses have their favorites too, but often favor blogs or e-mail marketing. The question is, what really works?
According to a new report by marketing firm, SocialTwist, while social networking accounts for 24% of business referral links, they account for 60% of the click-throughs. This is very telling, but also pretty obvious. E-mail marketing usually comes the company providing the product or service. Within social networks, a much higher percentage of these links are coming from the customer-level. The source is more reliable. And therefore, the link is more highly trusted.
And while Facebook is currently the most popular social network, Twitter has become, by far, the most effective network for clickthroughs, yielding a huge average of 19.04 clicks per referral, compared to Facebook at 2.87 clicks. Now, this can be accounted for that on Facebook, your network is made up of largely friends and family. While on Twitter, your network typically contains a much more relevant group of those in your industry.
So, will Twitter become a B2B advertising mecca? We’ll see. But there’s some huge potential there.