MySpace delivers more traffic to HMV than MSN
This is a post I wrote this afternoon for the Spannerworks SearchSense blog, but wanted to post here to as the key fact is really powerful for me:
I see two big, here & now reasons that search engine marketing needs to take note of social media:
1. If you are doing a good job of being useful to your networks (aka social media) your usefulness will be reflected in your search results (you should do well).
2. Social media / networks do things that search has done in the past: filter websites for relevance and refer people to websites they are likely to find useful.
The second of these - what some might call partial disintermediation of search by social media - is given credence by Heather Hopkins' analysis of traffic to HMV. She notes that MySpace, the world's largest social network, is the 8th largest referrer to High Street music retailer HMV.co.uk.
That actually puts it ahead of MSN.co.uk as a source of traffic to the site.
Naturally, as Heather notes, this highlights the sense behind MySpace's decision to start selling music itself. She adds:
"To underscore the competition among music retailers and social networks, we should point out that the Scissor Sisters are currently featured on the MySpace homepage. Searches on the increasingly popular band sent 2% of UK visits in the past four weeks to HMV.co.uk and 1.56% to MySpace. The #8 search term sending visits to HMV.co.uk in the past four weeks is "scissor sisters". If you do a search for "scissor sisters" on Google, you will notice that HMV.co.uk has a prominent sponsored listing in the search engine results page."
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