When I evaluate my own blogging I look at how effectively I’ve managed to refer traffic from different sources. One of the key metrics I look at is how long people have stayed on my site, as this tells me if they have have actually read something or just bounced of (or left their browser window open).
Below I look at the referral data from the last 2 months. The circled numbers are Average time spent on site from Social media sites. At the top are sites such as Slideshare (I upload all my keynotes there), E-mail subscribers and LinkedIn.
However, If I’d sort this data by number of referrals sent to site I would get different names at the top. These would then be Twitter (t.co), Facebook and LinkedIn.
Twitter is great at spreading links. A well tailored phrase with a link attaced to it can get huge attention with a few re-tweets from some heavy weights. All that looks great when I analyse my social media metrics stats, but how good was it really when I see the Avg. Time on site?
Different networks are segmented differently. The people who see me LinkedIn posts are closed acquainted with me and have a larger interest than random Twitter users that sees a Re-Tweet, to read my posts. Also, someone that went all the way from reading my Slideshare presentation to actually clicking through to the site are also likely to stay longer on the site, these are hot leads.
Now, this is just a blog and I don’t really need to care so much about getting valuable traffic or not. I’m just happy if people read what I write and if we can start interesting discussions. But if you sell things online, looking at your social media metrics as well as how the referral traffic from these sites looks like is key.
