Cory hinted at this story in the briefs below, and now we’re fleshing it out a bit because it’s so interesting. The website for the The New York Times, like so many other sites, continues to see the majority of its traffic (50-60%) going directly to the front page. But an ever-increasing number of views are coming via social media. Mark Glaser at PBS MediaShift spoke with New York Times assistant managing editor Jim Roberts about the traffic trends, both from social media and direct visits:
“(Facebook is) not our main driver of traffic, but we’re seeing a steady increase over the past few years. I can only expect it to continue. I don’t have the raw statistics to show that increase, but we still get the vast majority of traffic through our home page, whether it’s people who type out the NYTimes.com URL or bookmark it.”
(Later in piece) “I think the jury is still out in how much benefit we get from those efforts. We’re still trying to figure out whether it’s worth our while. My gut instinct is it’s definitely is worth our while and that if we can do that on subjects from politics to sports, we’d like to do more of that.”
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It’s interesting to me that getting 50-60% of visits to your homepage is still considered a good number. When social media was driving 2-3% of traffic, plenty of people scoffed at it. Now that it’s in double digits, it’s clearly a part of any successful website strategy.
Also worth noting: The goal of being on Facebook and Twitter is not just to drive traffic. Just as we can’t prove web visits increase viewership, using social media is not only for getting bigger visitor numbers. It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison to see visitors coming directly to your site vs. numbers driven by Facebook. The goal is to meet the audience on their own terms and engage them. In the long run, that will help your image tremendously.
I don’t want to take too much from Glaser’s excellent Q&A, so here’s just one more nugget.
Those are serious numbers. And when you consider that the average Twitter user has about 140 followers, and the average Facebook user has about 130 “friends,” the potential reach of your audience is massive. Remember: people don’t just retweet – they retweet retweets and so on.
Social media is not a panacea for local media web traffic. But it is more more piece of the overall strategy. The New York Times looked at its initial social efforts, adjusted its staff accordingly and is now moving on with a new strategy. That’s what we’re talking about. Experiment, experiment, experiment.