Social Network traffic has seen some interesting trends as of late. There is no doubt that social networks are here to stay, and will only continue to become more mainstream. However, not all sites are seeing booming traffic, in fact some seem to be tailing off.

I have spend the past few hours looking at the data as it relates to Social Marketing sites and there is some interesting trends. For convienece, I have used the Hitwise tables (found on the Hitwise site) in this post so you can get a sense of the trends.

According to Hitwise who looked at visits in August 2008 among a custom category of 56 of the leading social networking websites stated that MySpace.com received 67.54 percent of the market share.  The market share of U.S. visits to the social networking custom category decreased 2 percent in August 2008 to 6.40 percent of all U.S. visits compared to July 2008. Visits to the category decreased 17 percent year-over-year.

Among the top 10 social networking websites, Facebook ranked second by market share of U.S. visits with 20.56 percent, followed by myYearbook, which received 1.65 percent. MyYearbook experienced the largest gain in market share in August 2008 among the top five visited websites, increasing 256 percent compared to August 2007. Tagged and Facebook followed, increasing 147 and 50 percent, respectively.

Top Paid and Organic Traffic to Social Networking

In August 2008, the top search term driving paid clicks to Social Networking websites was ‘classmates.com’ with .03 percent of all search traffic. The paid clicks from Classmates-related terms in the top 30 accounted for .06 percent of all search traffic. Organic clicks off of the term ‘myspace’ drove 14.96 percent of all search traffic. Among the top 30 organic terms, organic clicks on MySpace-related terms accounted for 25.96 percent of all search traffic to the category.

MySpace Tops among Average Time Spent

In August 2008, the average time spent among all social networking websites was 19 minutes and 56 seconds, representing an increase of 14 percent compared to August 2007. Among the top five most visited social networking websites, MySpace led with users spending an average of 30 minutes and 32 seconds on the website. Facebook experienced the largest growth in average time spent, increasing 23 percent in August 2008 to 19 minutes and 30 seconds from 15 and 50 seconds in August 2007.

SinoTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn) announced today that they have launched a specialist youth channel, called KidsNet, for advertisers targeting young internet users.
”The KidsNet channel provides advertisers a single channel that can reach multiple youth audiences simultaneously, whilst enjoying the flexibility to target specific consumer profiles by content, geographies, and time of day; thus, delivering tailored ads,” Dr Mathew McDougall, Group CEO & Executve Chairman for SinoTech Group.

According to the company, KidsNet will reach more than seventeen million online youths across China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong.
This channel is working with a variety of platforms including social networking, entertainment, shopping, gaming and sports sites across China. KidsNet is the latest channel for SinoTech Media and complements, BizNet, ITNet and FashionNet to name a few of their other key channels.

The rise of blogs, customer reviews, photo- and video-sharing sites, and other online social media have empowered consumers/competitor and partners with a new power.

Further, with search being able to index all the blogs and comments into one organic list it can result in either a positive branding exposure or a negative one…a very negative one….. So, it depending on the sentiment of those writing, reviewing and comments on company and their brands that really control the brand experiences in today’s search engine results.

There is much written about how to build positive brand using Search Marketing but this blog will outline what to do when you get negative attacks on your company and brands

Over the past 6 months a relatively new area in Search Marketing has emerged- that of Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM). In order to combat a negative campaign we must consider more than just SEO. The company (or the search marketing company doing the work) needs to quickly neutralize all offending content. The quickest way to do this is to use sophisticated SEM techniques. This strategy is singularly the most important area necessary to produce the desired result promptly.

Firstly, data mining processes need to be employed to monitor (in real-time) large numbers of search behaviors and search trends. Once the search technology has identified trends or patterns in keyword searches that highlight negativity campaigns, a reputation protocol must be rapidly adopted to start combating this. It is important to note that offending content is often found on keywords used by shoppers earlier in the buying cycle than those found on a branded search. Complaints can sour customers before they even discover your brand has a desired offering.

Once the keywords have been identified, bid maximizing tools should be used to monitor, report and purchase pay-per-click (PPC) search ads in an automated fashion. PPC ads change by time of day. Some keywords disappear as budgets expire. PPC ads from your competitors or trademark infringers tend to disappear on weekends or evenings, and reappear during business hours. The purpose of using technology in a reputation management strategy is to ensure that timeliness and effectiveness are central to this strategy; also ROI can be easily determined.

Search reputation management involves three primary components:

? Prompt identification of negativity trends and pattern in keyword searches.

? The use of SEO to try and displace information found in organic search results.

? An immediate action to counter offending content by using SEM to display positive information or to drive traffic to sites (micro) that counter the negative messages.

Remember, finding the negative campaigns is only part of the solution, using sophisticated searchmarketing techniques is a core component in combating this increasingly frequent problem. For more information you can read -

http://www.sinotechsearch.com.cn/en/reputation_management/

The recent focus for Internet advertising has been on direct response advertising, where direct marketers have leveraged the internet’s ability to track consumer behavior and infer purchase intent to deliver relevant one-to-one marketing. As example, the  paid ads next to search results. But there is more to Internet advertising than the CPC text ad…… What about brand advertising? Social networks (facebook, myspace to name some examples) and blogs have begun unlocking the interactive/social nature of the Internet, but taking full advantage of this interactivity and online communication remains a huge untapped opportunity for advertisers.

Although social networks have traditionally struggled to effectively monetize their inventory, the emergence of scalable, engaging brand advertising driven by consumer data could go a long way towards helping such large web companies make the most of their online audience. The advertising world is starting to realize this.

There is growing agreement among marketers that we are moving towards  three key principles that will shape the future of online advertising are:

1) Companies are beginning to realize that advertising is both a science (relevance) and an art (engagement)

2) Data is becoming more important than ever, and

3) The market will see an increasing level of co-opetition between advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers.

Internet Advertising lends itself to becoming a complex/simple math problem. With the right set of data, algorithms and targeting, it’s possible to create the most value possible by serving the right ad to the right person regardless of where they happen to be on the Web.

However, these ideas do not address the advertising intent which is another set of complexities. We would need to build in understandings of the advertisers goals and what audience segment they wanted to reach, and when they wanted to reach them. Another Blog enter down the track……