Facebook Likes do little to increase referral traffic and trust

The more Facebook Fans you have the more referral traffic wings its way to your website, right?

Wrong, say the folks at BuzzFeed.

According to them, "Facebook Fans do not equal Facebook traffic", in fact they found no correlation between the numbers of Fans a Facebook Page attracts and increased rates of referral traffic.

So what good is a Like? It's great for sharing content on the social network, but according to BuzzFeed it is certainly not a sign of loyalty or intention to purchase.

According to BuzzFeed's Matt Buchanan, writing on the company's blog, "the half-life of a like is very short: It doesn't mean so much for brands or sites general pages that last and last and last. But they mean a whole lot for oh-so-ephemeral pieces of content. Because that's what people actually share."

Another thing that Facebook Likes isn't indicative of is trust.

Last month About.com revealed that, for the vast majority of people, the number of Likes a Page has doesn't matter - it's the activity on that Page, or about it, which was more likely to increase trust.

In fact, Likes seem to have little significance. "It's hard to tell how old a Like is, or why people were liking them", stated one respondent to About.com's survey, while another said "I wish Likes would just go away. What's the value?"

Tags: brand marketing, Facebook, referral traffic, social marketing, social media, social network, website traffic