Here’s exactly what “Share/Social is the New Search” means
Billboard magazine reports that The Beatles sold more than two million individual songs worldwide and in excess of 450,000 albums in its first week on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. (The Beatles’ catalog was added to iTunes on November 16th.)
According to Experian Hitwise, it was social media — not search — that drove a lot of the online interest and, more importantly, the online traffic surrounding The Beatles addition to iTunes. Consider this stat: On November 16, the first day Beatles songs were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.
And Hitwise says Apple received a “huge spike” in UK traffic coming specifically from Facebook. The week prior to The Beatles launch on iTunes, Apple was the 86th most popular outbound destination from Facebook; after the launch, it jumped up to the 20th most popular. Hitwise says that one in every 200 web site visits that left Facebook went straight to Apple’s web site.
I never quite got the “share/social is the new search” quote that has been floating around for a few months now. This is it.
What’s fascinating is that we’re doing share/social without realizing it. It’s passive. It’s an active thing to go to Google, type in a search, and find your answer. In this case, it’s viral marketing at it’s best.
I think what is the most interesting about all this is that the market is self-selecting of good and bad. You could argue that crappy work will go away because people will only share what is interesting and unique. No more SEO. No more sites like Mahalo whose entire business model is predicated on the fact that they can bait users into clicking on their Google search.
