Is this the death of organic social media traffic?

According to the Social Media Examiner, organic social media traffic is dead. What they’re really saying is that if you’re relying on your Facebook page, your Twitter account or your LinkedIn reposts to get clicks on your site, you’re taking aim at the wrong place. In almost every case, most of your clicks will come from Google organic traffic.

What does this mean for you? If you check Google analytics and you are getting the majority of your traffic from social media and not Google organic traffic, then you’re leaving money on the table. There’s a much greater possible increase with Google than with any social media site. If you have a lot of social media traffic, you should be getting even more organic Google traffic. If not, it’s a clear indication of where you need to work on your site.

That’s not to say that you should ignore social media. It’s still important, but maybe not as much as everyone thought. Enjoy the traffic you get from it, but base your main efforts on organic traffic building, instead. We did a basic search for ‘Google’ (yes, people actually still do that!) and we found that, even though different social media sites ruled in different parts of the world, Google blew them away everywhere in terms of the sheer number of impressions every day.

What does work on social media is the personal stuff, not the branding, and that shouldn’t be a big surprise. It’s supposed to be social. What I’ll be concentrating on in the future are more Facebook Live videos, including those that allow all of you to ask questions.

This article was originally published on stewartmedia.com.au. 

Jim Stewart is a leading expert in search engine optimisation. His business StewArt Media has worked with clients including Mars, M2 and the City of Melbourne.