What is the best social media site for a small business owner? What does ‘best’ even mean? How do you define best?
Is it the social media site that gives you and your business the most engagement? The most traffic? The most leads? The most gravitas to your brand? The most awareness?
I have just carried out a long overdue assessment of the source of my website traffic from social media sites. Bear in mind that the stats below are only traffic stats as recorded by Google Analytics.
But the figures are a good reminder that our time and effort should not be spent on the social media sites that are the most popular, or sites which we might prefer on a personal basis.
Because the social media platform that drives the most traffic to my websites is one of my least favourite sites: Facebook.com
However, I cannot ignore the data. It is clear that I am not spending nearly enough time promoting my business on Facebook, as opposed to other sites which take up far more of my time but only deliver a sliver of the traffic volume I get from Facebook.
Here is the actual data from 1st June 2019 to yesterday, 21st December 2019 for 4 of my sites (these 4 are the sites I would be most concerned about, for different reasons).
EmploymentRightsIreland.com
1.Facebook 11,031 (91.97%)
2.LinkedIn 721 (6.01%)
3.Twitter 139 (1.16%)
4.YouTube 90 (0.75%)
BusinessAndLegal.ie
1. Facebook 1,406(71.59%)
2. YouTube 282(14.36%)
3. LinkedIn 114(5.80%)
4. Twitter 107(5.45%)
TerryGorryWrites
1. Facebook 54(58.70%)
2. LinkedIn 28(30.43%)
3. Twitter 5(5.43%)
4. YouTube 5(5.43%)
SmallBusinessLawIreland.com
- Facebook 33 (50.77%)
- YouTube 26 (40.00%)
- Twitter 4 (6.15%)
Data source: Google Analytics
Conclusion
Only a fool would ignore these statistics and immediately change course to spend the most time and effort on the most important platforms for my business. Any serious business owner or marketer is obliged to act on the data and evidence, not on hunches or personal likes/biases.
A word of caution: the figures above only measure website traffic from the various social media sites. This is not the only metric you should be assessing-for example, it may be the case that the traffic you get from Youtube, having watched your video, is more committed to doing business with you and is less likely to be a tyre kicker or simply attracted by curiosity.
And I know myself, from my client base and leads I generate, that YouTube is a huge factor in bringing me new clients, even though it does not compare well in a simple “traffic to website” metric.
Another major factor to be considered is where the traffic is to be found along the marketing funnel: at the awareness level? At consideration? At conversion stage?