Are You Losing Out On Targeted Social Media Traffic?
An overview of the top social media referrer sites, and a few best practices to help you in your social media marketing efforts.
An overview of the top social media referrer sites, and a few best practices to help you in your social media marketing efforts.
With 43 percent of social media referrals, StumbleUpon recently beat out Facebook and Twitter as the largest social media referrer, according to StatCounter. However, many experts don’t put much credence in the information, and for good reason.
StumbleUpon likely counts social media referrals from its URL shortener Su.pr. Those URLs refer traffic not just from the StumbleUpon site but also from Twitter and even Facebook, which can skew the data a bit.
Regardless, the information is interesting and raises an interesting question: are websites losing out on social media traffic by not using some of the top social media referrer sites?
Top Social Media Referrers
Driving traffic from social media sites can be the most important part of your social media marketing campaign. Determining which online portal is going to drive the most qualified traffic, or combination of sites, can be tricky.
What are your overall goals with driving qualified traffic to your site? The answer to this question will help you decide which of the below are right for you.
StumbleUpon
Regardless of the data you look at, clearly StumbleUpon is a great site to help drive traffic.
There are a few downsides to this portal compared to others that should be known. For instance:
The site does offer some benefits, including:
Even though less qualified traffic is being generated, there is still likelihood that someone unfamiliar with your brand or services might “stumble” your site and find what they didn’t know they were looking for. While the chances of this are slim, some may see it as a benefit.
Comparatively, driving traffic with Facebook isn’t as easy as StumbleUpon. However, when looking at the pros and cons you’ll soon find that Facebook might be a better fit for your efforts.
With Facebook, you must build a fan base. That fan base then has the ability to influence others, but dissimilar from StumbleUpon your information is less likely to be seen by a user who isn’t somehow already connected to your brand without some help.
StumbleUpon facilitates the “browsing” of websites more easily than Facebook. Facebook can drive much more targeted traffic to your site, however, and offers the ability to engage more with your fan base, more customization, and in general better options to optimize your traffic driving potential.
Growing a following on Twitter is similar to growing a fan base on Facebook. While it isn’t easy, you have the ability to influence others when your followers re-tweet or @ reply you. Because of this fact, utilizing engagement is necessary to increase your influence.
Driving targeted traffic to your site requires some effort, but can be done more easily than with StumbleUpon at least. In addition, users are likely to stay on your site longer, and not necessarily negatively affect bounce rate, pages per visit, and time on site.
The year of 2010 showed growth for the social bookmarking site Reddit. Over half a million more page views per month, and almost 3 minutes more spent per visit were reported in December 2010 over January 2010.
Similar to other bookmarking sites, the pros and cons don’t vary greatly. The underlying fact here, however, is that traffic can be generated using Reddit when great content is produced.
But targeted traffic? Not so much.
YouTube, MySpace, Digg, and Others
StatCounter currently monitors the top seven social media referrers, which include the above sites examined, as well as YouTube, MySpace, Digg, and others.
You’re bound to find some of your intended audience on each of these social media sites, but the trend here seems to be: a site that offers the ability to customize who will actually see your content can likely draw more targeted traffic back to your site.
Best Practices
Content is often the key to driving social media targeted traffic. Simply having your information on the above referenced sites isn’t going to do much except draw a small amount of traffic.
To get the best targeted traffic possible, you must think about where exactly that traffic is funneled to, as well as the audience on that particular site. Here are a few best practices that might help along the way:
Are you driving traffic currently from social media sites? If so, how have you optimized your efforts to drive targeted traffic to your website?
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