Hit Wise (an Experian Company), a key provider of online trands and statistics, has officially released its Top 10 Sites of 2008.
Based on searches made across the major search engines, the Top 10 Searched for Brands of 2008 were as follows:
- Facebook (2.39%)
- YouTube (1.57%)
- eBay (1.25%)
- Bebo (0.96%)
- BBC (0.86%)
- Amazon (0.47%)
- Argos (0.44%)
- Sky (0.27%)
- Tesco (0.26%)
- Yahoo! (0.26%)
Surprisingly in this years top ten by brand is that Argos has managed to displace the once most popular social networking site myspace, amazon and the bbc. The end of 2008 was a good time for 'traditional, offline' reatilers, with the top 100 offline reatilers gaining a 68% increase in traffic through December compared to online ony retailers.
The current trend towards people using search engines to navigate to URLs that they already know seems to suggest that whilst competitors such as Woolworths are going out of business, the Argos brand and focus on value for money has paid off during a year of continous economic gloom.
The placing of the top two social media sites facebook and bebo in positions 1 and 2 comes of no surprise in a year which saw the meteoric rise of social networking as a lifestyle choice and not just a place for internet geeks to build virtual relationships
2008 saw the rise of Facebook to being the UK's most visited website and given that four the top ten sites above (including You Tube) are classed as social media websites companies that do not consider social media marketing as part of their digital marketing mix could well be missing out on a great opportunity for increasing online brand engagement and targeted online advertising and marketing.
Hit Wise go on to state 'The fact that Facebook is the most searched-for brand and the second most visited site in the UK not only illustrates its success, but also the popularity of social networking in Britain. Social networks now account for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits and 1 in every 5 page views. Only search engines receive more UK Internet visits than social networks.'
Taking Facebook as an example, the opportunities for targeted marketing through user profile based display advertising and strategic PPC alone can give conversion rates similar, if not better, to Google AdWords. In our experience, whilst impressions may not be as high as on the most popular search engines, the fact that the audience is known (gender, age, interests etc) means that the number of conversions and general conversion rates can be better as adverts can be better tailored to the needs and interests of the user.
Will social media sites continue the success they have seen of the past few years? Well, given the current economic slowdown and the fact that many social media sites are now as important a communications channel as mobile phones it is our opinion that yes, they will. The question as to which social media sites will continue to succeed is another question entirely. In the current climate the ones that can monetarise their offering possibly will but they run the risk of alienating key audiences. Whatever happens it is more than likely that the likes of Facebook and Bebo will still be there next year and that we'll still all be twittering about it as well.
Author: Nick Towers
Director of Digital, Sagittarius Digital