Study Trashes Effectiveness of Facebook, Twitter

A survey, conducted earlier this year by Intellimon, in partnership with the University of Bradford, polled over 4000 online businesses.

The study's findings aren't exactly comforting to businesses considering the use of Facebook and Twitter for certain aspects of their marketing:

- While 67% of respondents use social media platform Facebook to promote their business, an average of only 29% find the platform effective in any way for driving traffic to their business website.

- Popular micro-blogging platform Twitter faired equally badly - only 27.2% saying they found it effective for generating website traffic to their business website. [One must remember, traffic to a website is but a tiny aspect of marketing success]

- The typical age of people doing business online is higher than you might have thought. Of the thousands of respondents, 62% were 50 years of age or older. [Why is this a bad thing?]

Commenting on the report findings, Intellimon CEO Paul Smithson said, "We were genuinely shocked by some of the results across several areas; Social Media, Training, Outsourcing and Demographics sections all threw up some very unexpected results. It's a real eye-opener, even for experienced online marketers."

Also found in the study:

- Despite the prominence of older businesspeople online, it was actually the youngest age-group (18-43 years of age) [What kind of demographic segment is that" What does an 18 year old have in common with a 43 year old?] who reported the highest success rate with their traffic marketing. 25.6% of respondents in this group reported their success rate as "good" or "excellent" compared with a spread of 9.8% to 16.3% across the remaining age-groups.

- Despite "Search Engine Traffic" being reported as the most important traffic generation tactic, an alarmingly low 62.8% [this is what we call alarmingly low?] of respondents perform SEO only monthly or less frequently.

- Less than 10% of traffic generation activities are outsourced or delegated, typically falling to a single business owner/operator to carry out the tasks required. [So are we to assume that in-house marketing people are idiots and can't figure out SEO on their own?]

- Refreshingly, across virtually every measure, training was acknowledged as being crucial to the success of an online business, with businesses training regularly and investing significant sums in different training materials.

If you care, get the entire study here.