What Social Media Sites Send Traffic Review
Over the last two weeks we have conducted two different experiments to measure what social media sites sent traffic. In creating the test environment we deliberately picked two blogs that were unknown with no existing backlinks to them. We also did not attempt to “game” or promote these blog post on any of the social media sites that we contacted.
Our first experiment was with a blog post called The Story of Tea. We submitted the post to 20 social media sites and watched the page become the 3rd most viewed page on the site with 826 page views! The second post was called “Shopping For Tents” and we submitted the post of about 30 social media sites. That post has had 303 page views.
Looking At The Traffic Numbers
Interestingly the same social media sites that the majority of the traffic in both experiments. The number of visitors from each social media site for both posts combined were:
- Stumbleupon.com – 512 visits
- Reddit.com – 65 visits
- Digg.com – 12 visits
- Fark – 8 visits
- Indianpad.com – 7 visits
- Google Referral - visits
- Technorati.com – 3 visits
- Netscape.com -3 visits
- Myweb2.search.yahoo.com – 2 visits
- Newsvine – 1 referral
Before the experiment began, I was expecting that based on some prior experiences that StumbleUpon would be the site to send the most traffic. The surprise was that the number was so large and that it was 5x the traffic from all of the other social media sites combined!
The traffic surprise was Reddit.com with 65 visits. I had rarely used Reddit before these experiments, but the traffic numbers indicate that Reddit is worth exploring further. I used a brand new Reddit account for these experiments, and based on these numbers I will be spending more time this month on Reddit and better understanding that community and what interests them
Is all Social Media Traffic Equal?
With any type of social traffic, you need to look beyond the raw number of visits. One way to measure quality of traffic is to see what percentage of visitors immediately left the site after reading the blog post. For Digg and Fark visitors, that number was 100%. Reddit users did not dare much better with 96% of the leaving the site and hitting the landing page. The Digg and Fark numbers are not a surprise and I believe that the Reddit numbers can be lowered by better understanding that community.
So what social site brought the best traffic? That would be StumbleUpon, where 67% of their visitors went past the landing page and visited at least one other page on the sites. So not only does StumbleUpon bring lots of traffic, it brings high quality traffic also.
Generating Links From Social Media
It can be difficult to gauge the number of incoming links from social sites in these types of experiments as the search engines do not report all your backlinks in real time. However an update to Google’s Webmaster Central does give us an insight into how the search engines look at social media links.
The Story of Tea blog post page has 63 incoming links according to Google (Yahoo shows 19 links). Those are pretty impressive numbers for such a short campaign. Remember that these are all deep links to an inside page, these are not links to the home page.
Both Google and Yahoo are showing links from trusted authority sites like Netscape, Technorati, Del.icio.us and Digg. These high quality links have helped propel the two posts onto page one of Google, and this in turn has helped drive organic traffic to the two web site.
So the benefit of residual effect of the social media sites will help both these sites for weeks to come as they continue to enjoy traffic from search engines (and the social media sites).
Filed under Case Studies, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (1) : Jun 18th, 2007
July 12th, 2007 at 3:28 am
[...] Last June, Social Media Optimization performed an experiment to see What Social Media Sites Send Traffic. [...]