UK charity social media sources

increase the overall number of visitors from social media sources to closer to 3%.

In Sept of 2010 I did another analysis of the impact of social media on charity web site visits. This latest analysis uses a slightly wider group of social media sources and charities comparing the period 1st September 2009 to 31st August 2010 with the period 1st September 2010 to 31st August 2011. The data is a simple average across 10 different UK charity sites varying from 10k to 250k visits per month. The data was collected from Google Analytics using an Advanced Segment as described in the previous post. For all the charities the Top 5 social media sources comprised around 80% of all the sources in the Advanced Segment. So the 80/20 rule applies and there is no long tail of social media referrals.

The Social Media Advanced Segment that I used covers many kinds of sources but three distinct groups can be identified. The first might be considered true social media. Here the big two, Facebook and Twitter, are becoming more dominant but for some charities Linkedin brought many visitors. The second group is social bookmarking sites where the two that did well were Stumbleupon and Netvibes. If you are not using them currently they are worth investigating as they have been very successful for one or two charities and as this report shows for national newspapers such as The Guardian and the Daily Mail. The third broad group is Communities and Forums. Examples are in-house Forums plus places such as moneysavingexpert and sector specific forums. As the sites I reviewed used different referral methods the numbers coming from in-house communities and forums may be undercounted. Finally, Google+ sends very few visits directly to the sites that I reviewed and to my surprise YouTube did not feature in any Top 5 list of referring social media sites in the last 2 years.

Social Media spreads the word

1. Direct Referrals: You can be sure that visitors have read and reacted to a post if they click a link in it.  There are many ( too many ?) link shortners which allow you to track how many have clicked on a link in your post. Twitter`s proprietary shortner, t.co, is now fully operational  and automatically works on any links that are included in a Tweet. Bit.ly remains the most popular choice as it can be used to log how many people clicked on links to sites and pages other than your own. You can see visits that have come to your site via shortners in your Google Analytics account. GA >Traffic Sources> Sources > Referrals

2. Better search engine rankings: Social media activity is now clearly affecting search engine rankings. Postings and reaction to them are becoming a more important part of the collection of `signals` that search engines use to determine what content to display for a given search query. Ian Laurie has noticed that Google is now putting more emphasis on Twitter and Facebook account activity. So a Google search for a brand or charity plus a top social media site such as Twitter or Facebook eg `rnib Twitter`, or `breast cancer care Facebook` now produces results which include sitelinks. Normally Google only shows site links for Organic and/or AdWords results for highly regarded sites. Ian`s view is that sitelinks are shown only for those SM accounts that have some unique content. A quick check that I did on a number of charity accounts seems to bear that out. Over at SEOMoz they did some tests to check if social signals drive search engine traffic and they found that they did. However they do suggest that Google +1, which has yet to be widely used by visitors to charity sites, is a big part of it.

3. More Backlinks to your content from authority sites is still the most powerful signal to Google that your content is worth showing. Without backlinks it is almost impossible to rank in Google. To date charities, who normally have well written content, could rely on media and government site to mention and link to their content. But the web is daily becoming a more competitive place so social media is a great way to identify key influencers and get them to link permanently to your content. If you can use SM to build a relationship that leads to a link from an important site or blogger then you will get visits and kudos with Google. So, long after your Tweet or FB post has been forgotten the backlink will still be sending visitors and convincing Google that your content deserves to be shown. Backlinks: the gift that keeps on giving.

Image by inanpw at Flickr http://bit.ly/q9KqTC

The table shows the Twitter Influence of each account as measured by 4 well know tools. In addition, for the 11 charities, I have included  data on the number of referrals to the web site from Twitter and as a further measure of influence the final column shows the the number of referrals per follower. Here low is good.

Twitter `Influence` and performance for 11 charity sites

The 11 accounts shown have individual web sites and Twitter accounts. Each Twitter account has between 1k and 10k Followers and has sent between 1k and 5k Tweets since they started which is mostly between late 2008 and early 2009. The accounts are divided into two types. 1 to 6 are information and advice oriented – think debt info, pregnancy advice, etc. Accounts 7 to 11 deal with conditions -think conditions related to heart, lung, MS, etc. For all accounts I have listed 4 measures of Twitter influence as calculated by – Klout, Twitalyzer, Retweet Rank and Peer Index.

Also shown is the Follower Ratio which is the number of Followers divided by the number Following. GA:refer/Twitter is the number of visitors to the web site taken from Google Analytics for the period Jan to June 2011. ( Traffic Sources> Sources> Referrals>Twitter). The final column is the ratio of Followers/Referrals ie the number of Followers divided by the number of referrals to the web site by Twitter. So if you had 10 Followers and 5 referrals your score would be 2.0, 10 Followers and 10 referrals your score would be 1.0. So lower numbers show that a higher percentage of your followers are interested enough in your Tweets to click on a link and visit your site.

The Klout and Twitalyzer ratings for both groups are quite similar. Retweet Rank which is “the number of times users been retweeted recently” varies quite a bit probably because of the variation in recent activity on each account .  PeerIndex which is “a single measure of status ” Overall the ratings for both groups are quite similar although those concerned with conditions do slightly better. Overall these numbers are good indicators of where you should expect your Twitter account to be.  With their lower scores the `communication` charities are, as might be expected, somewhat better at getting Twitter followers to visit their web site.

You can check how your account compares by using the free web checkers from Klout, Twitalyzer, Retweet Rank and Peer Index. In addition you can see how effective you are at driving traffic to your web site by checking your Twitter referrals in GA for the same period.

Facebook and Twitter are most popular with UK charity visitors.

The share of traffic from social media sources varies among the surveyed sites from a (very) high 6% to less than .5%. Twitter and Facebook are the largest contributors to social media visits and are the fastest growing of the social media sources. Comparing the last 6 months with the previous 6 months Facebook sent 65% more Visitors while Twitter sent 80%. If you are comparing the absolute number of visits remember that Twitter is reckoned to be under counted in Google Analytics by a factor of 4 or 5.

This analysis is similar to the social media analysis I did back in March 2010. This time I included Visits from over 34 social social media sources and ensured that the analysis was comparable across all 6 sites for both periods. Three of the sites had visitors in the 10/20k per month range with three more having over 100k visits per month.

The data comes from Google Analytics using the Advanced Segments capability. You can do this test on your own web site by using Google Analytics Advanced Segments. You can easily create you own version of the Advanced Segment or drop me a line and I will send you the one I used with its specified social media sites. Once you receive it simply log into your GA account and paste the url into your browser. Voila !  you can check how your site compares to the ones I did.

Click for Larger Image

You can track how many visitors a page on your site receives as  a result of your Tweets by Tagging any Links that you put into your Tweets. Bit.ly, currently the most popular URL shortner, can be used with Google link tagging. Simply add tagging parameters such as Source and Medium to the end of the url, shorten in Bit.ly and post to your Tweet. Now when you look in Google Analytics > Traffic Sources you will see a separate Medium ` Twitter` and provided you have tagged your links they will appear listed for each Tweet you have sent out. Now you know how many visits your links have brought to your site.

Incidentally if your site uses the AddtoAny bookmarking service ( as this site does) then you can see full details of what pages have been bookmarked by looking in GA >Content > Event Tracking.

Combining the use of Advanced Segments, Link Tagging and Event Tracking will give you a good idea of how your Facebook and Twitter activity are affecting your site.

Most popular Social Sites

Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic for many web sites and for some web sites rival Google in their ability to drive traffic.

However for these UK charities the social  networking sites are not big drivers of traffic. The analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 95% of visits from the social sites, although Stumbleupon had some success. While the data says that Twitter brought about 33% of the visits that Facebook brought in reality Twitter probably brought more as many believe that Google Analytics undercounts Twitter visits by a factor of 5 or more.
Social Networking sites have an important role to play in reaching specific audiences but for now it is best to tag each tweet and check the stats for the specific landing page to really measure the impact on visits.

In a separate study Nielsen noted  that  “in February the largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. ” with a further 25% aged 55+.  Note – this is based on US data.  To find 50 or 500 fans/supporters for your brand or cause now, more than ever means creating something that resonates with the target audience via social media.