Marketers spend billions to attract search traffic from Google, but late last year Facebook started becoming a bigger source of traffic for some large websites, according to analytics firm Hitwise.

...Since the beginning of the year, Facebook has become a bigger referring site than Google to a        number of sites, including gossip sites PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and, yes, Twitter...

Since the beginning of 2009, gossip site PerezHilton.com has received 8.7% of its visitors from Facebook, compared with 7.6% from Google, according to Hitwise. 

I'm not saying Facebook's the Google killer du jour (perish the cliche). But marketers do pay close attention to this. Heck, I do. You know when I started getting really into Twitter? It was when Twitter surpassed Yahoo as the #2 referrer to my blog (behind Google). I suspect some day it will be #1. And that was before I was really into Twitter.

This stuff matters, and I will spend more time writing about this soon, but I welcome your comments in the meantime so we can start a dialogue.

Del.icio.us

Digg

Reddit

Furl