Facebook is great, if I’m not looking to bring visitors to my site. I can share, interact and spend hours upon hours of time updating my status and commenting on photos. But I can hardly convince my Facebook friends to visit my blogs and read through what I write.
That’s what I’ve discovered after checking out the Google Analytics for this blog.
[TABLE=2]
Pages / Visit: The average number of pages viewed during a visit to your site. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
Referrals from my Twitter and my StumbleUpon accounts visited my site substantially longer than visits from Facebook, Google and other blogs. The bounce rate was also below the average for my site.
Why? Because Twitter and StumbleUpon serve people who are interested in me and my thoughts, according to this data. I have plenty of friends on Facebook, but how many of them refresh their friends feed non-stop to see who’s doing what?
The above table shows me that my Twitter and StumbleUpon contacts are more interested in the links and content I’m sending out.
Another advantage to Twitter is that it imports the New Media Bytes feed and syndicates it using tinyurl. Facebook also imports this blog, but often my notes are only visible on my account page and others can only find them on blogs where I’ve embedded my Facebook badge. So that means all the work I’m doing on Facebook won’t necessarily push people to visit my content outside of the social networking site.
I’ll continue using Facebook of course, but promoting my material is best done using the other services. Online journalists interested in promoting their content should take a cue from the the USA Today’s On Deadline Twitter and Pop Candy Twitter. Both do a great job in promoting stories and personalities.
How are you promoting your content? Think Facebook is the way to go? If you do, try tweeting soon.
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