Q & A for this Monday is about a serious dilemma facing many luxury brands and retailers…The question is “would you rather have a high traffic website platform or millions of social media followers?”
Before you answer, do you understand that both offer very different returns on investment. Most people assume that having millions of social media followers, automatically will attract millions of people back to their website. Which is actually, almost the reverse opposite.
Having High Traffic Site Versus Social Media Followers
Most luxury companies are in conflict on where to devote their marketing budgets. Earlier we did a feature on “why luxury brands should avoid influencer social media“….Revealing, in the U.S., people currently spend 70 percent of their time online browsing the open web, outside of social media and search platforms. However, most marketers devote a much smaller percentage to where consumers spend most of their time. Opting to focus a greater percentage “considerably” use of luxury advertising budgets to social media Influencers.
Take for example Kim Kardashian West has over 100 million Instagram followers. We know this because “Kim celebrated in Kardashian style” with a special Instagram post when she reached over 100 million followers. Featuring her daughter North West celebrating the 100 million milestone.
However, even with over 100,000 million followers on the Gram, According to EasyCounter still Kim is only able to attract around 28.7k daily visitors to her “personal brand website platform” at the time of this feature release.
As daily traffic can change and often shifts upward or down at the end of a website platform month’s tracking cycle.
Answer
It’s clear social media is still necessary for driving brand awareness and engagement.
Luxury brands and retailers should start devoting more advertising and marketing budgets by focusing on digital marketing website platforms. Typically, many high traffic websites don’t have equal number of social media followers.
After all at the time of this feature Amazon.com had not yet even reached 1 million followers on Instagram! When Kim Kardashian West has over 100,000 million followers on the same social media platform.
Amazon has around 941k followers on Instagram, that’s astonishing because Amazon is ranked in the top percent of the most visited websites in the entire world.
So even if a website platform doesn’t have a mass social media following, this doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing if the site receives good online digital traffic.
Shifting to this focus will drive revenue online faster and increase brand awareness.