Two case studies in the UK show that Social Networks can drive traffic

There are two case studies conducted in the UK (by Hitwise) which proved that the power and commercial influence of MySpace and social networking sites is indeed great.

Heather Hopkins, VP of Research at Hitwise UK, on two different case studies found out that visits to Topshop.co.uk and Asos.com originating from MySpace had surpassed those coming from Yahoo! and MSN UK Search combined!

“The #2 source of UK visits to TopShop.co.uk was MySpace, accounting for 5% of site visits. MSN UK Search and Yahoo! UK Search each accounted for just over 1% of visits” she says.

In addition, as the figures below show, on January 2007, more than twice as much traffic from MySpace than from MSN and Yahoo! Search combined was received by the two retailers.





However, many things have changed in the social networking landscape since January 2007 and I strongly believe that a new research will show even greater upstream traffic originating from social networking sites. It looks like social networks are steadily becoming major players that can drive traffic, especially to commercial websites.

found @ Hitwise