Shareaholic looked at six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites which were pulling in more than 250 million monthly unique visitors and analysed which social media referrals delivered the most.
YouTube drove by far the most engaged traffic. These referrals had the lowest bounce rate (43.19 per cent) and the highest pages per visit (2.99) plus the longest duration (227.82 seconds).
Google Plus and LinkedIn delivered the fewest referrals but they were worth having. Google Plus referrals on average spent more than three minutes looking content and visited 2.45 pages with a bounce rate of 50.63 per cent. LinkedIn spent 2 minutes 13 seconds on each link clicked, viewing 2.23 pages with a bounce of 51.28.
Twitter and Facebook tied in fourth place for bounce rates, pages per visit and time on site. And Pinterest did a poor sixth with a bounce rate twice as high as Facebook, only StumbleUpon visitors spent less time on a site.
The message could be that because video is such an engaging medium referrals from YouTube are more prone to spend time checking out content – it could also be that the YouTubers were clicking through to more video content on the visited sites as that is what they enjoyed (that data isn’t available). But one thing is clear, video is a powerful medium on the web.
Graeme Gourlay, Syon MD
Tags:engagement, referrals, Social media
