I wrote an entry a while back about my attempt to get 5000 visitors to my blog in a week (it usually averages about 100). Suffice to say I failed. The reason I failed is that I lost interest. The pattern of write, promote, get a few hundred visitors then rinse and repeat got boring 2 days in. There was nothing in it for me. I didn’t spark any huge debates. I ran out of interesting things to write about so starting on the mundane. I was so over the idea of another storm of digg or reddit users coming past and pooing all over my opinons I just gave up.
So back to what Social Media can do for you. The short answer is not much. The longer answer is that while it provides very good short term traffic and a fair bit of buzz about your site the longer term effects are pretty much zero. After the initial spike there’s usually a couple of days where visitor numbers are still up but that all drops off eventually. The average user doesn’t provide much value either. They don’t stay around and read more stories, they don’t click ads because they’re not after something to buy. In fact you could pretty much say they’re just a waste of bandwidth.
For example in the period of April to May this year visitors to this site from Stumbleupon consumed an average of 1.2 pages. Their average time on site was just 12 seconds. Not even enough time for them to read the first paragraph of most of my articles. In comparison, the average time all visitors to the site spent was 35 seconds. Almost 3 times as long. Compare both these types of visitors those from search engines. They know what they’re after. They consume 1.53 pages a visit and spend a whopping 1:36 on the site.
Major sources of traffic to Greener Desktop
Since writing about my first dabblings in social media my site on paper looks like a success. Traffic is up almost 120% for the month and something like 400% for the year (I don’t have exact figures for this one). But alas because as soon as I stop posting to digg, reddit, stumbleupon, buzz and all the rest my traffic flops. It goes down to exactly the same number of visitors a day as it was getting months before I started. Why? Because Social Media does nothing for SEO and without people finding you on search engines you’re lost in a sea of websites.
Let me just wrap things up by saying this is just my experience. I believe social media is effective at driving short term traffic and that can be very useful for things like promoting one off events or selling a product. For building long term traffic though, I believe it’s useless.
It’s well known that the Rudd campaign was the first federal election campaign to use social media effectively. The year was 2007 and the slogan Kevin 07 rang thick. Not just through old media but online as well. Obviously this wasn’t the first time the internet had been used to help reach potential voters. Websites, blogs and display advertising have all been used in the last few campaigns. I remember seeing banner ads for Howard’s campaign as far back as 1996 when he took on the then encumbent Labor party. The difference in 2007 was that the dialogue changed. It went from being one way communication to a conversation that listened to and engaged with the voting public. It also quite likely won them the election. There was a huge swing towards Labor much of it coming from young, first time voters. Who obviously felt engaged by a party and potential prime minister who was willing to listen.