However, as most of us discovered these numbers do not really translate into substantial business gains. Marketing emails quickly became spam and most of us either deleted them or built elaborate spam filters around our email IDs. Most websites promise and indeed continue to deliver massive amounts of pageviews, but ad click through rates do not match the expectation of most marketers. The problem again is one of relevance. Marketers are generally unable to get to their target audience, as audience profiling on the web is still far from mature. In this scenario marketers have little option but to try and reach as big a base as possible…expecting some of the reach to be relevant. One of the most successful online advertising options is Google adwords.
This program is at the heart of Google’s revenues and works with the simple premise of providing relevant ads based on keywords that users search for. So if your business deals in cameras, all you have to do is buy the relevant keywords and users typing those keywords would see your ads. Simple, yet the system has its flaws. For one thing, most of the popular keywords are very expensive, so the cost of each conversion goes up. Second, even keyword mapping has not proved to be as relevant as it seems. Bounce rates from SEM campaigns can be very high. Basically means you paying to drawn irrelevant audiences to your site.
In this environment, Social Media Marketing takes the best of online marketing, which is the volumes, and adds loads of relevance to create a killer marketing tool. The fact that you can do it for minimum cost is a tremendous bonus. The main advantage an SMM marketing campaign is its ability to attract and hold relevant audiences. This is because an SMM campaign would actually require the user to participate…thereby creating an environment of active consumption, not the passive consumption mode that is the norm for most marketing strategies. For example on twitter of Facebook, you will have to either “follow” the product or campaign or “like” it. This indicates a first level of interest on what is on offer. A good SMM campaign will then ensure a high degree of user engagement to get the message across.
This brings me back to the SMM campaign for compareindia.com, which is underway on Facebook. It has been two months since we began a page on FB, which we populate everyday with information on products and prices. The number of “likes” per day has gone up from about 25 to 27-28, people liking our FB page. We have also seen an increased level of user interaction on the page. For now the interaction is between users and compareindia staff. Our target is to get users to interact among themselves, thereby creating a great buyer community. That has not happened yet, but that could also be due to the low number of fans. We have a little under 1500 fans, and as this number goes up, I expect the level of interaction to also increase. As stated earlier our objective to set up this page, was to drive traffic to our website. The numbers from FB continue to increase impressively. While the base is still low, current pageviews growth is at 75%, the highest among all other traffic sources to our site. Also the quality of this traffic is much better than what we get from search engines. By quality, I mean users from our FB page do more on the site and spend more time there, than users coming to us from searches.
User behavior on compareindia of traffic from FB Vs Google
| Parameter | FB Traffic | Google Traffic |
| Pages/Visit | 3.04 | 1.83 |
| Average time on site | 3 mins 57 secs | 1 min 28 sec |
| Bounce Rate* | 53.14% | 60.41% |
All in all, SMM is helping compareindia reach out to a wider audience. The only problem we have is with the pace of this reach. It would be great if we could get more users to “like” our page everyday than the current 27-28 users.
This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Entreprenuer. It has also been published online on biztech2.com. The link is here: http://biztech2.in.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/quality-trumps-quantity/95382/0
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