Social Media Sites Send 11% of Traffic to Content Pages

According to Outbrain’s “Content Discovery and Engagement Report, Q1 2011,” social media sites send 11 percent of traffic to content pages. This trails more traditional sources of external traffic such as search, content sites and portals.

The report shows that search methods (Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Ask.com, etc.) send 41 percent of referral traffic to content. Meanwhile, links from publisher sites (including manual partner syndication, linkswaps, etc.) send 31 percent of referral traffic to content pages.

Portal homepages (Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AOL.com, etc.) account for 17 percent of traffic to content, while social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.) send 11 percent of traffic to content pages.

Overall, the top 20 traffic sources to content pages in the first quarter of 2011, according to Outbrain, was as follows:

1. Google
2. AOL
3. Yahoo
4. Facebook
5. Drudge Report
6. Bing
7. MSN
8. Twitter
9. Outbrain
10. FoxNews.com
11. StumbleUpon
12. Fark.com
13. The Huffington Post
14. MediaTakeOut
15. Reddit
16. PopEater
17. CNN
18. RealClearPolitics
19. The Washington Post
20. Digg

Google, AOL and Yahoo accounted for nearly a quarter of all traffic to content pages in the first quarter, according to Outbrain.

News was the most popular content type shared via social networking sites, as 42 percent of news stories were likely to receive traffic from these sites. Entertainment stories followed with 30 percent, while lifestyle stories had 13 percent.

When it came to engagement, search delivered the audience with the most average page views per session, followed by content sites, portals and social networking sites.

Traffic from content sites had the lowest bounce rate per session, “presumably because they are targeting an audience that is already engaged and in content consumption mode,” the report notes. Meanwhile, audiences sent from social media sites had the highest bounce rate per session.

Content sites delivered the most hyper-engaged readers, which Outbrain defined as readers who view five or more pages per session. Search followed, while social and portals lagged far behind.

Facebook and Twitter deliver similarly engaged audiences, according to Outbrain. “The one key difference is in their relative reach, which we define as the number of unique visitors per 1,000 sessions. Specifically, we found about 72% of sessions originating from Facebook were from a unique visitor, versus only 52% in the case of Twitter, suggesting that Twitter’s audience is more likely to be made up of repeat visitors.”

Source: 

http://blog.outbrain.com/2011/04/outbrain-content-discovery-report.html