Since I will hold a session at this years future music camp about search engine optimization of band websites and the importance of the homepage for a bands online marketing I was preparing everything and looking up some statistics. With my band In Legend we have been right away very active on Facebook but also created a great video for Youtube and especially in the beginning we used myspace a lot to introduce our music to a new audience. So I was curious where most of our traffic came from during the last year. Our main focus for sure is Facebook but I was surprised to see that we received twice as much traffic from myspace and Facebook only ranked number 5!

Remember that 40% of our search engine traffic comes from lyric search and search for downloads of our music. this means 20% of our overall traffic comes from this souce. Compared to 6% traffic from facebook we see that doing search engine optimization correctly for our band page drives three times more attention than our activities on facebook!

I have to admit that in the last couple month we received more traffic from facebook than myspace. But we stopped to be active on myspace which could explain the recent decrease in traffic from myspace.
Since we really put a lot of effort in Facebook marketing I wanted to see how well we bring our fans to the store. So The following statistic shows you on which channels we have been able to drive our fans to amazon (by tracking every link we spread)

Again facebook is very poor! With direct mail and our homepage we have been able to send 4 times as many people to amazon than via facebook. Well the interesting part would be the conversionrate. Maybe for some miracle the conversionrate on Facebook was much higher than the other channels. Unfortunately I can’t present detailed statistics on that (Amazon doesn’t share them!) but from the daily sales figures and my knowledge from when we used which channel to promote our album I have the feeling that the conversionrate on facebook is about the same as on our Website and direct mail!

Conclusion

To me facebook seems to be highly overrated and overvalued. Our sales would have been much less If we did not have a great customer relation management / Newsletter and homepage. Maybe I should call this thing the facebook bubble! What is your experience?