About Mert Erkal

He left his full time job as of 1st August, 2008 to earn his living as a problogger from blogging and freelance Internet projects. He also shares his 10 years of experience he gained in a giant multi-national company for Small Business companies and builds Corporate Identity. Read more about him!

May
14th

Survey:Do Social Media Sites Increase Your Loyal Readers?

By Mert Erkal in Blog, Marketing PR

1o days ago I started What is Your Main Source of Traffic – Join my Poll survey. Above chart represents the survey results.

It is obvious that Social Media Sites are the main source of traffic for most of the bloggers in 2008.
If we were in 2007, the chart would be completely different. Google were the main source of traffic for most of the bloggers in 2o07.
Does that mean we should not bother ourselves for SEO anymore by 2009-2010? I believe SEO will still be one of the key factors.
The next obvious question: Quality or quantity? Do Social Media Sites increase your loyal readers or often create bounced(*) traffic?
In my experience Social Media Sites mostly generated bounced traffic. However, this does not mean that they did not help me at all. They helped me on personal branding.
I prefer 10 targeted readers to 1000 bounced visitors. I am the owner of the house. If my visitors run away from my house without even knocking the door, this is something I should seriously think about decreasing the bounce rate. But this is another issue I will address later.

(*) A bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages before a specified session-timeout occurs. A commonly used session timeout value is 30 seconds.

What do you think? Please join my survey (down below, on the right) and have your say. Thanks in advance!

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Comments

blogbookmark.com May 14th, 2008

Survey:Do Social Media Sites Increase Your Loyal Readers?…

Do Social Media Sites increase your loyal readers or often create bounced traffic?…

bloggingzoom.com May 14th, 2008

Survey:Do Social Media Sites Increase Your Loyal Readers? | http://www.searchforblogging.com...

It is obvious that Social Media Sites are the main source of traffic for most of the bloggers in 2008. Quality or quantity? Do Social Media Sites increase your loyal readers or often create bounced traffic?

In my experience Social Media Sites mostly g…

Colin May 15th, 2008

From my experience it depends upon the blog and its content.
My primary blog has a loyal readership but the main traffic is through search engines, whereas my secondary blog the majority of readers are from the blogosphere.
Quality of content is the one thing that retains readers and most readers of my primary blog will contact me via email rather than leave a comment, whereas those from social sites will comment.
Social sites have their advantages and disadvantages, again this also depends upon content and whether it is good enough to retain targeted readers. Social sites will always generate a certain amount of bounced traffic, so one needs to consider the reasons behind this and address it.
Striking a balance is never easy in any competitive market and requires a great deal of forethought and also looking at who your target audience is so that a good balance can be maintained.
Looking at incoming searches gives a good idea as to what individuals are looking for, and feedback from social sites also gives an insight as to what bloggers are looking for, so one has to craft their posts to appease both.
Colin – Free PC Security

Rajeev Edmonds May 15th, 2008

Social media interaction does bring in readers, but large chunck is boucing traffic, especially from StumbleUpon. Digg also send similar traffic.

Twitter does send much focused visitors.

Karen Bryan May 19th, 2008

I agree that the vast majority of traffic from social network sites is bounced traffic. I see a large spike in traffic numbers on my Europe a la Carte blog when one of my posts is tagged but no corresponding increase in click throughs on ads or affiliate links.

Some of my best traffic comes through referrals from other travel related sites.

However as you say it depends on the blog a I’m also editor of the Wandalust UK travel blog and receive traffic bonuses there so an increase in traffic is more beneficial to me there.

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