Social networking has become the most popular activity online and visits to the category represented 13% of all US Internet visits in December. As the social networking audience continues to grow, the category has become a major source of traffic for retailers, surpassing categories such as Rewards and Directories, comprised of comparison shopping tools and affiliate websites. In December, the share of upstream traffic to the Retail 500 custom category increased 37% as compared to the previous year, the highest year-over-year increase among major traffic sources. One common question regarding the relationship between social networks and retailers is how to be sure that the traffic coming from social networks is not just a by-product of their popularity. For many users, there is tendency for visitors to either always have a tab open logged into a social network or returning frequently to check for updates. One measure of success is the sheer number of followers or fans, etc. along with the amount of interaction and dialogue taking place. Many marketers have used promotions to attract new users, which quickly grows their base within the social networks and provides opportunities to at least passively provide messages to the users (although possibly amongst a significant amount of clutter). Another way to consider the intent of the users is through search queries where either retail-related terms are driving traffic to the websites of social networks in search engine result pages or users are searching internally within the networks for retailers.

As an example, we ran a custom analysis of internal searches on Facebook to look for retail brands during the holiday season. The chart below shows the weekly downstream traffic from Facebook to the Retail 500 and the top retailer names within the internal search results. During the holidays over 2% of the traffic to Facebook (the 2nd ranked website in the US) visited a website in the Retail 500 immediately after. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Bath & Body Works (and others) all appeared within the internal searches taking place on Facebook signifying that consumers were actively seeking their content and offerings.