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.
