Why Social Bookmarking Sites Traffic Sucks
6Posted on Sep, 22 2008 under SEO by Héctor Cabrera
If you agree with the statement above in the heading, congratulations!… but this blog post is not for you. You already know what I’m going to say here. If you still want to hang out and have your say in the comments section -or worst, you think that Social Bookmarking Sites traffic rocks- then you may want to keep reading what I have to tell you.
Urban Legend vs. Numbers
When was the last time you checked your sites’ stats? Your favorite Site Analysis tool/service (eg. Google Analytics) can really help you understand what is going on and why. The wealth of information provided by your site analysis tool/service is quite impressive and can be vital when working on tuning your site.
From my experience, visitors coming from “standard” websites (blogs, forums, static sites, etc.) are more inclined to read and interact with you than those coming from social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.ici.ous and StumbleUpon. Personally, I spend about 30-60 seconds on every site I find while stumbling - why should I believe that my readers act different?
Anyways, I think it’s time for some numbers:
Average Time on Site: Visitors from problogger blogs as The Number 39, Genius Hackers, Steve Pavlina, The Net Strife and Rajaie Talks spend an average of 5 minutes reading my posts and interacting with me and other readers. People who come from Social Bookmarking Sites spend less than 50 seconds. That’s around 80% less than regular visitors! You can tell that most of this “social” visitors are passive readers, they are here just to read and stumble away to the next site. No interaction between you and them. No comments. No discussions.
PageViews: in terms of pageviews, so far the difference isn’t that big. Regular visitors have an average of 1.84 vs. 1.73 pageviews from “social” ones. Difference is only 6% here. This tells me that I need to work more on my blog’s layout structure in order to keep regular visitors browsing my posts. In the past few weeks I’ve been making some small changes to Rauru.com so I do expect to see an improvement on this metric soon. If you have any suggestions I’ll gladly hear what you have to say 
Bounce Rate: this metric for regular visitors is around 60,84% (which is great for a blog!) vs. 67,82% from stumblers and diggers. That’s not so bad either. However, it can be better.
What really worries me is the fact that visits from Social sites generates no interaction at all. They are just statistics, nothing more. That kills the whole concept of blogging - interact with your visitors and discuss about topics that passionates you and your community of readers.
Other Traffic Sources
While social bookmarking sites are good to attract traffic, in the long run most of these social visitors won’t come back again. It’s only a temporary thing that usually last only a couple of days. I prefer to build a loyal readership and get rock-solid stats than getting 10000 unique visitors one day and see those stats drop over time.
In my opinion blogs and forums are better traffic sources. Traffic comes directly from your social network -I will discuss about this later in another blog post- and more likely have some sort of relationship with you: friends, colleagues and even people who admire your work come to read what you have to say and participate in discussions. They spread the word about you and have their friends and relatives visit your blog and join your loyal legion of readers. You build relationships which often goes beyond Internet into real life in the form of conferences, meetings, and -why not? :P- maybe even some dates xD.
What really matters to me -and I’m sure that you feel the same way- is the quality of traffic. I’d prefer to recieve only 800 UV if all these people were really interested in building a community. What good is too get 20,000 UV if they don’t comment or interact with you?
What about you? Do Social Bookmarking Sites make a difference in your traffic? How many of these visits actually stays and become a regular commenter / member of your site?
You might also want to read these:
- Traffic Building - For the Total Newbie
- How To Drive Quality Traffic To Our Blogs?
- Rauru.com Reviewed by Blog Design Studios!
- Why you should have a robots.txt in your sites
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6 Responses to "Why Social Bookmarking Sites Traffic Sucks"
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[...] Use of Social bookmarking sites - Although, Ikki believes that traffic from social bookmarking sites sucks, however I still believe that a blog with good stats will always leave bigger impact on people. Of [...]
[...] schedule and stick to it. Use of Social bookmarking sites - Although, Ikki believes that traffic from social bookmarking sites sucks, however I still believe that a blog with good stats will always leave bigger impact on people. Of [...]
[...] Why Social Bookmarking Sites Traffic Sucks [...]
[...] I’m not a big fan of social traffic, Social Bookmarking Sites as Digg or StumbleUpon can certainly drive a lot of visitors to your [...]
Let me be the first human to post a comment on this post. Many people have a wrong impression that they can use social sites to pitch their products and services. It is wrong! You need to network, not use it as a sales tool. Traffic generation form social sites will work only if you manage to establish a credibility on the site. In that way, your traffic will be quality too
Unfortunately, most social sites have been conquered by spammers by now. Because of that, sites listed there have lost credibility among social surfers. How can one believe that traffic from such sites is good? I can’t, can you?