According to many industry 'experts' social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter represent the future of online marketing.

But are their claims just hype and is the investment needed, particularly in terms of time and effort, ever paid back in terms of sales or even visits to the blogger's website?

To try and answer this question I recently conducted a little experiment to test the effectiveness of blogs and twitters as marketing tools.  Admittedly not the most scientific of tests, but it did highlight some interesting trends.

For months I had planned to travel to the Moto Grand Prix at Le Mans and decided to provide live updates of the bike trip from my mobile on both a blog and Twitter, and test the commercialising possibilities by directing interested traffic to a site providing information on other MotoGP bike tours.

The results proved interesting with Twitter and Facebook together generating just 29% of the traffic to the website.  Meanwhile search engines generated more than twice the number of visitors - a total of 64%.

Although the results are far from scientific, the test revealed that no one technique should be used in isolation and despite the social media revolution, SEO remains king!