Social Nets Driving Retail Clicks
Via Research Recap comes this summary of a Hitwise report showing that UK web traffic to social network sites has now exceeded that to web-based email systems like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. Social networks like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace accounted for 5.17% of UK traffic in October as compared to 4.98% for the email sites.
While those numbers may come as a surprise, what I found more compelling was the chart below, where Hitwise shows that clicks to retail sites from social networks exceeded the traffic sent by the email sites. Let me repeat that - social networks in the UK were driving more clicks to etailers than the major web-based email sites.
I find that shocking, especially when you think about all of the promotional email that the etailers send out on their own, all to generate links back.
I'd like to dig further into the Hitwise numbers to see which widgets or pages are generating the clicks and what online retailers are the greatest recipients, but on the surface, this suggests that the referral-based marketing that is at the heart of the newly launched Facebook ads is already occurring a meaningful way among social networks.
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