Evan Carmichael compares conversion rates across channels: search traffic converts best because people arrive with buying intent, while social media users browse for entertainment. His email list of 60,000 converts better than his 105,000 Twitter followers, and newsletters outperform social posts because they land in inboxes and last longer than posts that disappear within hours.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Don, who's asking about social media, and he pulled up an old quote of mine from the forums in 2009 where I was talking about conversion rates of social media traffic, and I wrote, in 2009. From my experience, social networking traffic, Twitter included, also converts at a far lower rate than search engine traffic. And he said, is this true, or do you use something now that gives us better returns and conversions? I would still say this is true. I spend a lot of time on social media. A lot of the stuff that I do day to day involves social media. So making these videos, I'm very active on Twitter and Facebook and Google+ now, and Pinterest and my forums. So there's a lot of social media stuff that I do, and I really enjoy it. I think it's a way to connect with my audience a little bit more and also know, you know, what's happening in my industry. But in terms of the conversion, I think you're still going to get much more conversion off of search engine traffic and even newsletters than you will from social media traffic. And the reason being, when somebody comes to you from a search engine, so whatever services you sell, if you sell salsa dance lessons like my wife does, when somebody types in salsa dance classes or dance classes, they're looking for a specific solution to a problem they have, right? They're looking for a provider to help them with salsa classes. So they're coming with more of a buyer's mindset. Where when people go on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, a lot of them are just browsing. They're there to kill time. They look for things that might interest them. Really, you know, super short attention span. So they're looking to be, you know, entertained a little bit, not necessarily looking to buy anything. So it's a lot harder to convert those guys into buyers compared to from a search engine when they're specifically looking for the services or products that you provide. So I would for sure, if I'm looking for conversions for my business, still focus on the SEO side of things and driving people from search engines because they have a much higher intent to buy. After that, I look at my newsletters. I think my newsletter converts way better than my Twitter or Facebook or YouTube. Again, here you're able to send a message to somebody's inbox and you're pretty much guaranteed that it's gonna reach them unless, unless they block you off as spam or blocklisted you. If that's the case, you need to provide better content. But for the people who do like what you do, you're pretty much guaranteed to get their attention through an email, where with Facebook and Twitter it's much more timely. And same with YouTube, it's, it's what's happening right now. And some of the, the half-life of a Facebook post I think is only a couple hours, and for Twitter I'm sure it's much less. So unless they happen to be on right at that moment, they're not going to see your message. And so every time you post something, you're hitting a portion of your audience. Where somebody signs up for your newsletter, you could send it out, they may not check their email till the next day, but they're still going to see that message that you have with the sale, with the new promotion that you're putting out. As long as they wanna see it. Where with Facebook or Twitter, if they don't check until the next day, your message is gone. It's just gonna be buried by everything else that was put up. So, you know, the ability to convert people is much higher on my newsletter list than from Twitter or Facebook. Just an example, we have as of right now around 60,000 people on our newsletter and 105,000 or so people on our Twitter. And I get way better results from my newsletter list than I would from my Twitter. Not that I ignore Twitter, I love Twitter, spend a lot of time on Twitter, same thing with Facebook and YouTube, and I get a lot of great personal satisfaction and joy from using those because I get immediate feedback from people and they tell me that what I'm doing is awesome and it's changed their lives, and that makes me feel really good, makes me want to do more. So there's a lot of value there, but in terms of If I had to pick something that I was only focused on conversions, then I would look definitely at search engine optimization, driving search engine traffic, and building up my newsletter. So I guess we're still in 2009. Don't know if that's changed much in terms of conversion rates, but thank you for the question, Don. I hope that helped answer your question. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I do these videos because I love doing it, and I love seeing the thumbs ups come in. So thank you, and if you have a question about social media or conversions or another question for your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below, and I read every one of them and do my best to try to respond to everybody as well. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
