Last LA2M Of The Season

I attended a very informative LA2M last Wednesday and it was the last one of the season. The speaker was Derek Mehraban of Ingenex Digital Marketing. The topic as digital leadership and how businesses and individuals can use digital media such as social and professional networking sites as well as other forums like blogs to promote their brand.

I thought the stats he brought up throughout his presentation were very interesting. Most are listed below.

Mehraban talked about the battle among digital giants for the time on site top spot.

In May 2011, 180 million people visited Google sites compared to 157.2 million that visited Facebook.

Although Google had more visitors, visitors to Facebook looked at 103 Billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on site compared with 46.3 Billion Google pages viewed with an average time on site of 233 minutes.

Some questions come to mind when I hear these numbers and knowing a little about the businesses that Google and Facebook are in. For instance Google is a search engine and users are starting out with the intention to have the site find another site for them. It is not surprising that a user would not spend a lot of time on a Google results page if they have been shown results that are relevant to their query.
This assumes that these statistics are not including other Google web properties such as Youtube, Buzz, Gmail, and any of the other services that Google runs. It seems that Facebook would be even further ahead based on these statistics.

Facebook on the other hand is a social networking site that people come to in order to accomplish tasks such as communicating with friends and family, viewing images, playing games, modifying their accounts, and a lot of other things that will take much longer than sifting through search results. These statistics do point out one very obvious fact, that content is what will make people stick to a site and not bounce away.

More interesting stats

Websites with a blog attached generate 55% more traffic than those without one.

This one isn’t surprising as search engines love to index new content with lightening speed. Blogs are one of the easiest ways to update fresh content on a daily basis which is a factor in how a website ranks in search results.

74% of consumers rely on social networks to do research before making a purchase.
It wasn’t clear if these consumers were doing research online and then going offline to make their purchase or buying off of the internet or some mix of the two. At any rate it is pretty astonishing that this many consumers are using social networks to read reviews on products and otherwise ping their networks for information.

41% of B2B and 67% of B2C companies have acquired new customers through Facebook alone.

Overall social networks and other web properties are merely another channel for businesses to connect with consumers. Many of these customers may have very well still bought from the same business had they not been on Facebook or some other social network however by being present in the online world, these companies included in the stat were able to connect or get in front of their potential market in yet another place.