Whether it be more or less, social media is still a traffic driver.
A recent study done by Outbrain, a company that strives to bring relevant content to websites, concluded that social media outlets are poor traffic drivers to your website. They claim that users that are on Facebook and Twitter feel more comfortable staying in their social network and only glean over the links but don’t actually click through. I’m not exactly sure how reliable this information is though. Facebook and Twitter are giant social networks that are constantly driving traffic to websites for the latest information.
It may be true that there are people who just look at the links and move on but both Facebook and Twitter only allows users to write so much about the link they are sharing. There’s a brief preview about the content you will click through but it’s hardly enough to get much relevant information out of. Twitter limits you to 140 characters. You really have to be good at being concise and writing intriguing headlines to get users to click through. That could be more of the problem than users just glancing at content.
When you view the feed from Twitter users, sometimes it’s like reading a foreign language. Users have to abbreviate text and use codes to communicate within the 140 character limit. Facebook is better in that respect but users are still limited on how much text they can put to accompany their post. So in the end, users still will click through if they are interested enough in what you are sharing.
Content producers need to concentrate on creating quality and unique content. Content is king no matter what. SEO and social media are assets to help content producers to drive traffic to the information they are providing. Accessing a network of millions of users will help to create traffic more or less. Don’t stop your social media effort based on this study.
