The discussion about Facebook experienced a tipping point last week: third-party data confirmed what many observers had been suggesting, that Facebook exerts a powerful influence on how consumers are using the web.
Sheer scale is the first hurdle. Compete released data that showed Facebook outstripping Google in terms of web visits in January, a significant accomplishment.
Then, generating measurable activity across the web from that scale is the second hurdle.
SFGate, in an article using Compete! data, concluded that Facebook is driving more traffic to web sites than any other site. In fact, Facebook is the single biggest source of traffic to the web portals, like Google and Yahoo.
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.
Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.
These two data points illustrates that a consumer’s internet experience has evolved from being self- directed to group-directed. Typing search terms into Google is becoming a secondary activity to following the map of the web that is being constantly updated by your social circle.
“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”
One of the reasons that consumer behavior is shifting is because of the innate authenticity of their social circle. This experience of authenticity is increased the reliability of the information that people provide about themselves. The University of Texas at Austin recently released a study showing that profiles on social networks are generally very truthful.
“I was surprised by the findings, because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves,” study co-author Sam Gosling, a personality and social psychologist in the department of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, said in a statement. “But these findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing a positive spin for the profile owners, but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions.”
We’ve been talking about a new web paradigm. Clearly, it is here.
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The devastation in the real estate industry over the past three years has had a huge personal toll on the tens of thousands of people who had built businesses, and personal wealth, during the real estate boom. Real estate agents, brokers, mortgage professionals, appraisers, builders…all have seen their income plummet along with home prices and the pace of transactions in the market.
Over the past year, we’ve done a lot of work to be certain that we understand EXACTLY what value we offer our customers and how they can best use our products and services to be more successful. We’ve conducted controlled tests to determine how many leads — property-specific phone calls, e-mails and web visits — we drive for our advertisers. We’ve done research of past and current customers to understand what is working and what isn’t. We’ve done research of home buyers and home sellers in order to understand how they acquire information during the home purchase process, and why they pick one realtor over another.
A light bulb went off: A real estate agent should start by stating how much money they want to make, calculate how many homes they need to sell to make that amount and then decide how many buyer and seller leads they need to sell that many homes. THEN they should make decisions about how to market.
This week at the National Association of Realtors convention in San Diego, Scott and Todd are rolling out the work of their efforts.They ‘ve created a workbook with worksheets real estate agents can fill out in order to build a concrete and fact-based marketing plan.
