5 Good Reasons Social Media Traffic Isn’t Useless
I always see bloggers complaining about how useless social media traffic is. In their opinion, all the traffic does is: come with a sky high bounce rate, crash your server, take up bandwidth, bring along useless comments, etc.
I admit, most of the traffic from social media websites is useless, however, it does have some advantages.
1. Boosts Average Unique Visitors Per Day
When people say that social media traffic cannot help you make a dime, I’m sure they aren’t thinking like I am. If you use a service like sitemeter.com, it will show you the average unique visitors per day for your website. That number is obtained by dividing the total number of unique visitors by the total number of days you have been using the service. So when you get a couple hundred thousand of visitors, that will definitely boost your average unique visitors per day. And when advertisers are looking for a website to advertise on, they usually will ask for the average number of unique visitors per day. 
2. Always Provides A Conversion (Even A Small One)
Although social media traffic comes with an extremely high bounce rate, it isn’t a full 100%. If only 1% of the 50,000 thousand visitors you blog gets turn into returning visitors (which isn’t likely), that’s an extra 500! No matter how small the conversion, every tiny bit helps.
3. Boosts Alexa Rank
Since Alexa ranks a website based upon how many users with its toolbar installed visit it, a ton of traffic can really boost your ranks! (Although, Alexa claim that they have changed their algorithm, nevertheless, a ton of traffic will still help you out 
)
4. Introduces Your Website To Potential Readers
Landing on the front page of Digg can expose your website to a lot of new people. In other words, it can help spread the word about your website to others who might have been interested in your blog but never got the chance to hear about it before.
5. Boosts Your Technorati Rank
When articles go big on social media websites, they will usually get a lot of links from websites in the same niche. As you probably know, Technorati ranks a website based upon the number of websites linking to that website. (And other factors as well, but this is the main one.)
So as you can see, huge traffic spikes from social media websites are not useless 
What other advantages/disadvantages does social media traffic provide in your opinion?
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24 Responses to “5 Good Reasons Social Media Traffic Isn’t Useless”
I think the Social Media traffic software is low in terms of quality for e.g
out of every 25 visitors only 1 would stay for more than 2 mins
@Siddharth, sadly, that is extremely true
Lol. I only use Digg. It sends me at least 5 to 20 visitors every time I make a new post. I dunno, pretty decent.
Getting roughly 15k visitors through stumbleupon a month the first is so true, hehe. But we all know what sort of visitors stumblers are. Nonetheless those 15k extra definitely do look nice on your figures and that’s just one source :).
Alexa ranking is something which I personally give little interest too, the system is simply too flawed to be of importance for me. There’s a heavy selection bias and too easily manipulated. The only times I give some slight attention to it is on sites in the top 1000.
If I can believe my Google Analytics, most of my social media visits have a page per visit of more than two on an average and bounce rate is pretty low as well. It is anyway better than having Entrecard visitors (99% bounce rate?)
But you should concentrate on one main site (say blogcatalog or mybloglog) and be active there for best results. And use your tags effectively!
Cheers,
Ajith
Good post. I never thought of some of those things. I’ve appreciated traffic bursts, but never quite looked at them the same way as you’ve described.
@G, that’s a pretty good amount of traffic if all you do is submit the article.
@Slevi, hehehe, the feeling never fails to draw a smile on my face
@Ajtih Edassery, I would say commenting on other blogs is the best source of long lasting traffic.
@dcr, thanks, hopefully you will now see them in a new light
You have dug out some nice points. Even if social media traffic is not considered quality one it is stiil traffic ( most at least remain 20-30 seconds on your site). And at the end of the month when bloggers brag about their traffic they are not going to exclude the social media traffic in their monthly report.
@Agent 001, that’s true, traffic is traffic, no matter what way you look at it.
Boosting technorati and alexi ranks are very important as this can bring you a fair amount of traffic. I have been finding it hard to even get a couple of diggs on my articles though. Any tips on getting to the front page? Have you ever made it to the front page?
Well I never really got 50.000 visitor that come from social media
I would say, getting traffic from social media sites is very important especially if the site is very new and is crawling for attention. Later on, when it’s mature and get constant visitors, what it’s really matter is the traffic from search engines. Another thing is maybe to start focusing on comments. They can be an effective source of traffic.
I do agree that social networking traffic isnt useless, but I still think spending the same amount of time targeting individual readers pays better. When you leave for a weekend or go on vacation it is the individual readers that will still keep your blog alive for you even in your absence.
I submit to social media site to get some SE ranking for my blog
The traffic from them isn’t much helpful,they don’t even click on ads instead they waste my bandwidth!
@Ryan McLean, you have to consider a number of factors to be honest (the submitter, the type of content, the title used to submit, etc.) Check out my post “5 Important Characteristics Of Social Media Content“, it will definitely help you out.
@internet 4 money, usually you can only get that amount from Digg, but other sites are starting to send that much traffic as well.
@Kelly, very good point there
If you’re blog is new and is taking a while to get indexed, social media websites can really help speed up the process.
@Unconventional Marketing, I agree with you on that point, and while these people spend their time promoting their profiles, they could be writing more posts
@Rockstar Sid, heheh, social media traffic has always known at not clicking ads
Yeas, they are are great help to blogger but do you think they are always helpful
i mean, see it in the long run
read this and you will know what i am talking about.
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/2007/03/can_social_news.html
one nice idea for u rajaie
why dont u use plugin like socialable or share this
I wanna digg your this post but it is a pain to do manually
@Siddharth, I don’t really want to use a plugin for that, I could code it manually, it’s just that I’m too busy
Although, you might notice small changes that I make sometimes, hopefully adding a list of related posts and links to social bookmarking websites will come next.
@Asif, I would suspect social media sites to eventually fail if they did not constantly update their algorithm, but for now, they will do
@Asif - Thanks for the link… Very interesting
I wish I could use other social media networks but seeing I have so many badges of blogengage at my blogs I feel it’s unfair to simply submit them to similar social media websites! I still use digg and SU but ones that are like blogengage I don’t use for this reason including sphinn.
Your comment about every little bit help I must agree with!
It’s like saying it takes 100 pennies to make a dollar, so that makes a little penny makes all the difference from 99 cents to o a one dollar bill!
by the way welcome to blog engage Rajaie
@bbrian017, that is a very good example your provided at the end of your comment, and thank your for the warm welcome!
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