Plenty of people are asking good questions about whether social media matters. So I’m putting a couple of studies on my reading list. Soupsoup (via Kenyatta/Elspethjane/Tumblr in general, speaking of social.)
Two interesting reports out today. One from Aol/Nielsen shows that 66% of content is shared via email, only 28% on social networks (but much higher for those under 35.)
Another from Pew, showing that Facebook sends Huffington Post 8% of it’s referring traffic. Google sends 50%+ to Examiner.
The study also shows Twitter being a very small driver of traffic: “Of the top 21 sites for which there were data, Twitter showed up as referring links to just nine. And for all but one of those nine, Twitter sent only about 1% of total traffic”
Related, this has been simmering in my drafts for a bit. I could finish the thought, but you get the idea.
Alycia got me thinking about owning your conversation, identity and data portability. Not just because I’m annoyed that I keep bumping up against conversations I can’t weigh in on without first logging in to Facebook, but also because I had a great breakfast with Phillip in Raleigh. He pointed out that Demand Media’s acquisition of Pluck (or more recently of CoverItLive, a tool I found damn near as useful as Disqus, while I was compromising my values at Gotham Gazette) means that newsrooms found suddenly that the very folks they’d been decrying as nothing but a content farm suddenly owned their conversations. And their readership. And all the data about what content is most engaging.
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From another angle, we (“the company I work for, an advertising-based business”) have noticed that some advertisers who used to buy ads directly from us have stopped and instead buy ads targeting people who “like” our brand page or our content on Facebook, essentially finding our audience without having to talk to us. There is value we get from meeting our readers where they are but this is definitely something we’re thinking about and watching…
On the one hand, that is a pretty obvious strategy. On the other hand, my head just exploded.
Melissa asked some interesting questions about the AOL report: they lump Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail under “social media.” Why?
Because you maintain a profile on those networks? So then the question is, when they come up with numbers like 28% of content is shared on social networks, does category also include Gmail and Yahoo!? That is interesting.