Why Facebook needs to be in your marketing plan

Facebook’s enormous growth is not only changing the way people are spending their time, it’s now also changing the paradigm as it has become the number one source of traffic to major portals.

Facebook  has 7.2 billion pageviews every day and over 5.000 visits per second. This makes it the 2nd highest ranking site in world after Google with Youtube on the third position. According to research by Nielsen,  in the US, people now spend an average of 7 hours a month on the site. This is more than Google, YouTube, Bing,  Amazon and Yahoo combined!

This may explain why Facebook is now the number one source for traffic to major portals

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook. via Facebook directs more online users than Google.

 This trend, that has accelerated quickly over the past years means that social media are now ever more important in driving traffic to sites. Companies will still have to optimise their Search Engine results but will have to spend more time and money on social networks. This includes special pages and groups and an understanding of the dynamics of referrals and recommendations.