I’m not surprised by these findings.

I believe people look at tweets or posts with links as a sales pitch.

And many are.

What would be different if the links were content oriented and provided value as you say content is a critical driver. My guess is it takes time to build a reputation as a value driven content provider.

Art

It all depends on how you market to the people on the social media sites.
If you use direct marketing on these sites you will fail.

What is Social media? It is a place to talk, share and socialise. It is not a place to be directly sold to and this is one of the biggest mistakes marketers make. You need to talk to people first and share in what interests them.

If you want more traffic to go to your sites you must be prepared to socialise first before you do any marketing.

doesn’t say how effective paid ads on facebook are. This may affect how SEO companies will provide link building and social media submission services.

When advertising my products on social media sites i noticed a boom in sales, right away. I advertised the products i sell online trough Hyves.nl (a dutch social media site) and Facebook.com. Facebook allowed me very good targeting and it got me more sales than google (despite the fact i have a very good ranking there) and/or google ads. So it all depends on how you can target your market and FB is very helpful in targeting the correct market. I also advertise on a site called ‘Marktplaats’ (ebay owned), and Marktplaats outperforms them all by far.

For non-commercial purposes, posting a few links on FB carefully will work fine too.

I would like to clarify. Using posts on social sites won’t drive volume traffic. However Facebook Ads are highly effective when demographic capabilities are applied along with proper looking ad.

It might be that people visit the social sites (facebook, twitter, etc) because they want to interact with their friends and family; and they don’t go there for shopping

it is totally true what you are saying i am totally convinced with that
i tied to do that with my website hunting in jordan http://12caliber.com/ but as you said ( Social Media Sucks at Driving Traffic )
best regards
shanker

Well, while I tend to agree with the overall conclusion – that social media isn’t effective at driving traffic to private websites – I am a bit wary of the stats presented here, and what they actually mean. For example: “social media sites…. send 11% of traffic to content pages” – what exactly does this mean? Are we talking about paid-for ads or links posted in message, groups fb pages, or what? Are we talking about “messages” that are clearly commercial promotions, or are we talking about messages in which people invite their fb friends to check out a link? Are we including video links/views? Are we talking about unique visitors (to fb, etc), or does “f traffic” include users who login twenty times a day?
There are too many variables and unknowns in the figures given.

Having said that, I have been using social media (mainly fb and Twitter) to promote my websites for almost two years now, and I have to say the results have been very disappointing – especially when one takes intro account the amount of time and dedication that is required to build up a fb or twitter “following” in the first place. It seems to me that it takes as much, if not more, effort to get people to “like” your fb page, or follow you on Twitter, as it would to get people to visit your website through other, less time-consuming methods of promotion. It is also true – as suggested in the article – that social network users (especially fb users) are extremely reluctant to leave their fb “comfort zone” to explore other websites or other online communities. It’s almost as if they are passengers on a liner in the Pacific, and have little or no interest in the other ships and small boats that they sail past. Their minds are in a particular mode, and it requires too much mental effort to “switch tracks”.
To be honest, the only reason I’ve persisted for so long with social media is because I’ve read countless articles (supposedly by experts) talking about how incredibly effective social marketing is as a tool for driving traffic to websites. For a long time I kept thinking, “I must be doing something wrong”, but in fact I don’t thing I was, and I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that social media marketing is, if not a complete waste of time, then at least highly over-rated.

I agree with the article, at least in my case. Tried Clutter I mean Twitter, Facebook, Ning etc. traffic generated was hardly a trickle. 99.5% of my traffic comes from generic search.

Now what really gets on my nerves is all the SEO companies calling and emailing trying to promote Social Media to me. If they had “REALLY” visited my sight and done their research they’d see I’m already out there.

I agree with this article 100%.
Almost all tweet followers that i receive, are pretty much as a sales pitch, of a product or information service that they are trying to sell me. Driving traffic with social media to your sites, really does not work.

People don’t become leads any more. They research online, confer on social media and make decisions from what they’ve found online.

So why should you expect them to drive traffic to old fashioned methods and why are you using old fashioned metrics to measure the effect?

The problem isn’t new methods don’t work. It’s you.