Thoughts on Content Marketing and Social Media Traffic Benchmarks

Driving Traffic to your Content Marketing Efforts via B2B Social Media

My team and I often focus on using social media to drive traffic to our content development efforts (our case studies, eBooks, articles, etc). For a long time, we gauged our customer engagement on social media to steadily grow, but like many other companies, we are unsure if we are truly seeing success. I recently posted the following question on LinkedIn Answers.

What are some benchmarks for social media traffic to specific content types? Specifically, can anyone provide some insight on the number of hits Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can drive to blog posts, white papers, eBooks, etc? I know that this is partially based on the size of a specific network, so what is a good conversion?

Here is what the respondents had to say:

Jerry Nihen Social Media Marketing Consultant|Internet Marketing Consultant|Social Media Marketing ROI |Online Marketing |Author

Well it’s not only based on the size of the network, but also on the niche the company is in, and the relativity to the customers. Aside from network size, consider how big an actual company NEEDs it’s network to be. If you’re a local computer networking tech, 5-10 bounces from Facebook to a blog is fantastic, as each job could land a few thousand dollars.

Contrast that to a national gossip magazine, you’re going to need a LOT more clicks for it to be “successful.” I always determine a percentage of my Fans that took action (Using Google Analytics, tracking views directed from Facebook).

Paul Rothbein Marketer

Like most advertising I believe it needs to be assumed.

I think having this type of mindset might distract you from engaging an audience via social media. Because social media marketing is more about engaging your existing audience as opposed to getting brand new customers. It is a more personal type of interaction than objective oriented such as with old marketing methods. Brand new customers that come from social media are usually a byproduct of your existing customers spreading word of mouth.

Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP Head of Netherlands at 90:10 Group ★ Co-Founder at Agora Media Innovation

This will be a challenge in social media. It depends too much on the content, network, quality of the network, interaction of the network and objectives.