Strong iTunes Sales For The Beatles Driven By Facebook, Not Search Engines Or News

Where did people learn that The Beatles music was finally for sale as digital downloads and where did they go to learn more information?  Conventional wisdom would says a news site, Google search or even to Apple and iTune's itself. But instead, for many, Facebook was the source of more information about The Beatle's digital debut.

According to Experian Hitwise, on November 16th, the first day The Beatles were available on iTunes, 26% of UK traffic to Apple.com came from social media, about double the amount that came from search.

Looking at the websites receiving traffic from the top Beatles search terms, Apple again was low on the list. Despite paying for 67% of its traffic, Apple was only the ninth biggest recipient of traffic for the search term ‘the beatles’.