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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Facebook Drives Media Loyalists
Monday, March 22, 2010

Traffic driven to the top news and media sites from Facebook are among the most valuable referrals a site can get. According to metrics firm Hitwise, visitors coming downstream from Facebook (usually because of a direct link) are more likely to be return visitors to those media destinations than traffic driven from Google News. Among the top five print media properties for the week ending March 6, 78% of the Facebook.com users were returning visitors to those brands, compared to 67% coming from Google News. Hitwise found similar patterns in traffic to broadcast media sites. The Hitwise data regard users who had visited the same site within the past 30 days as return users.

Facebook traffic is not only more loyal than Google News users but it also beats the average traffic coming to the site from all sources.



The Hitwise data, of course, cannot explain the reasons why Facebook traffic appears more loyal. It seems likely that a site’s existing users are more likely to recognize, trust and click through on a familiar link from a known information source while they are on Facebook, while a Google News user is driven more by getting the details of a given news story and pays less attention to brand and source. Still, the data does suggest the importance of maintaining a robust presence on the social media site where a media brand can harvest and optimize the performance of its own audiences.

For more on media brands on Facebook, minonline is hosting the March 25 Webinar, “Using Facebook to Grow Your Audience, Your Customer Relationships and Your Online Business.” We will be featuring the expertise of Facebook gurus from LHJ.com, Time Inc., Network World and Harvard Business Review.


If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com


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COMMENTS
1.
It seems to me that this is more likely tied to your Facebook friends regularly sharing links from the same sources.

As you are reading your Facebook newsfeed, your friends are sharing the news. So you trust it more due to the nature of it being "refered" by someone you trust.

Additionally, this news is presented to you versus Google news where you go to search for it. The result are programmatically selected and provide you no context for which to make a selection -- such as "my friend liked this, I probably will too"

Times they are a changing, it will be interesting to see if this divide continues as the social networks of Facebook and Twitter - continue to evolve into information networks.
Posted by Jeremy Victor on Monday, March 22, 2010 @ 10:51 PM

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