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AALBC.com's Last MIllion Visitors Came From....


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google-traffic-sources.jpg

 

Despite all of the money, time and energy only 2% of my traffic comes from Facebook.  Not much more than Wikipedia, which I have invested a negligible amount of energy.  

 

Chris, this will be the type of information I will share in the article I'm writing.  I created this image for the course I teach at Baruch College.

 

I have also looked at Facebook data from a fews years ago when I had 1/10 the number of fans than I do now and I was get more traffic back then than I do now.

 

As you can see not other social media platform, including Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn cam in the top 10 and generated much less than a 1% of my overall traffic combined.

 

I'm going to run a similar chart for a few million visitors (unique).  I'm willing to bet that less than 5% of my traffic comes from all social media combined.

 

The end of the day, for me, search is the answer.  

 

Now if I was running a restaurant or something, my engagement on social media would be welcome, but I like my Blogging buddies, need readers to visitor our platforms. 

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Well my interaction on Facebook when I actively engage there is decent.

 

But it is very difficult to get people to come to my site FROM Facebook and engage here.  Again, the ability to do this has become even harder over that last two years. 

 

The main reason is that Facebook is very,very good at what they do.  They have made a science of making sure people stay on their platform--it is a super "sticky" website.

 

Another factor, implied by the stats is that many people, perhaps most, who use Facebook are doing so from Facebook's mobile app, that is not the type of configuration that lends itself to people leaving the Facebook ap to click away go to the browser app to visit another website, particularly one that is not optimized for mobile (thought this discussion forum is optimized for mobile).  So unless you put you content on Facebook's website, people are not likely to click away to read it.

 

Finally my demographic, are not the type of people who are going to be heavy users of Facebook.  It would be like me advertising in XXL magazine or buying a commercial on The Housewives of Atlanta--pointless.  Sure they have have a big Black demographic, but those are not the people who would most likely be interested in say, knowing that Gregory Pardlo, recently won a Pulitzer for Poetry or even reading his work.  You see what I mean?

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I want to write more, but I'm trying to figure out how to upload pictures to the board so I can drop them in since I am taking screen shots and I can't upload the screen shots to my server right now. I guess the easy thing is to say my best days on CBP always coincide with huge bumps in Social Media activity.  But on ARCH my sneaker site I have almost zero social media influence. As a matter of fact if I'm simply writing on my blog with sharing it, the organic traffic to both of my sites don't have hardly any Social media influence. 

 

I actually talk about this and give statistics and info in my new book that talks about how I launched the sneaker company. On average though when I look at my overall stats my number fall in line with yours in regard to social media. I tend to use it though because with my writing I've only seen sales of the book happen in conjunction with a lot of activity on Facebook.  I will try to post pictures tomorrow.

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Well I'm dependent upon traffic to my site.  If I were a restaurant and I was simply interested in people knowing my location, menu and hours, it would not matter very much where people discovered my website.

 

But since Facebook requires me to cannibalize my content, without any form of financial compensation, in an effort to tear people away from the platform to visit my website, it does not make sense for me.  I'm going to go two or three million deep.  I suspect the info will more strong support what is shown above.

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I agree that it will. I have also really started loving what Wordpress has done to counter Social Media. I use WP for my sites. Their recent update allows me to utilize a feature called Press This.  What this allows me to do is when I see content on Facebook, instead of just liking it and sharing it on Facebook when I go to that content, like your article on Gregory Pardlo this morning, I can click a button I've added to my bookmarks and it will pull the content from your site and allow me to create a quick post for that content which links directly back to your site!!!!!!! It literally cuts down on the amount of time it takes for me to share content. It's amazing. I can see this tool, if it's implemented by all bloggers, becoming exactly what will work to redirect traffic to sites and build real links.  

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Send me the link page where you have pressed the Pardlo article.  I agree that is a great way to share content.

 

I went three million visitors deep.  As you and I suspected the story is consistent.  Social does not bring users to my website.

 

It is amazing wikipedia brings as much traffic to my site as Facebook.  Again I spend no time on wikipedia. The impact of Google ranking Wikipedia so high in search is significant. 

 

 

3million-visitors.jpg

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Okay I'm trying to add something, but got a little frustrated with the delete bar actually erasing my post when I was adding pictures. 

Here are two pictures. One is from yesterday. We didn't create any content for CBP. The day before however one of the writers wrote a blog post on a fight that happened at a school here. It was hot on Facebook and on the next day that morning the Social Media influence can still be seen in this chart:

CBP.png

Now today, there wasn't a hot topic and this is from tonight, but I only posted a couple of posts using the Press This feature. One was the Pardlo reblog. Look at the interaction from Facebook:

 

chart2.png

 

Now these are my stats on the year from January to yesterday for CBP. What's interesting is these stats are consistent across the board for the last three years.

yearcbp.png

 

I have to think that this isn't a coincidence that there really isn't that big of a push from Facebook in regard to the sites. The problem is when I did my Kickstarter there was a direct influence on my campaign from Facebook.

 

See this article: http://www.arch-usa.com/arch-x-kickstarter-project/

38% of my funding came from running an ad on Facebook.

 

I wrote this article about not worrying about Facebook Likes where I explain that a like doesn't really determine the interaction or readers on your website. http://www.cbpublish.com/business-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-your-likes/

 

It's a very complex thing to look at and I'm hoping that this info helps to give you more data. Let me know if you want more of these kind of charts from me.

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"Stop making Facebook the center of your relationship marketing efforts." --Nate Elliott, Forrester Research, Inc.

 

This is one of the conclusions drawn from research conducted by Forrester Research, and summarized in an article Facebook Has Finally Killed Organic Reach. What Should Marketers Do Next?

 

It’s not as if marketers could count on much organic reach or engagement anyway. Ogilvy reported that in February 2014 large brands’ Facebook posts reached just 2% of their fans (a number that was falling by .5% per month). And earlier this year a Forrester study showed that on average, only .07% of top brands’ Facebook fans interact with each of their posts

 

Obviously, We've been know this for sometime now, but it is nice to have a reputable, unbiased, market research company validate your observations.

 

The research report is $499.  Check out the teaser they used:

 

Marketing leaders use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to build stronger customer relationships. But few people see companies' social posts, and even fewer engage with those posts. The result? Brands don't actually have social relationships with their customers. It's time for marketers to start building social relationship strategies around sites that can deliver value. This report will detail where brands can successfully reach and engage their customers, what social relationship strategies they should use, and what this means to the future of social marketing.

 

The emphasis is my own. Man is this not exactly what we've been trying to get folks to do? 

 

 

Here is a graph from the Ogilvy's website

Organic-Reach-Chart.png

 

 

Now if I could just get our people to understand this and react accordingly...

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You know I agree and those stats above validate this, but it still overlooks the kickstarter project which forces me to look at facebook as a tool for direct marketing through ads. The daily use of facebook as a marketing tool is negligible, but a paid campaign to your url can see some benefits especially when that destination is a kickstarter or some socially based funding situation. This report is just a reaffirmation. My second book goes into more detail but doesn't attack it head on. Once again as you said getting people to change their browsing habits is key but like boycotting it's not going to happen.

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  • 2 years later...

Here is a trend that I noticed regarding  us of AALBC.com since the website's upgrade: engagement is much higher and page views for 2017 are on track to a record high.  I plan to blog about this in the near future to provide more insight.  But this is great news and bodes well for the future of this website and websites and indie websites in general.

 

The graph below shows the detail behind AALBC.com last half million pages view.  This snap shot is from this summer which is historically the slowest period for website traffic (winter the busiest season).

 

The biggest change are the "Pages / Session" which tells you who many pages are viewed which someone visits the website. If you compare this number to the charts provided above yiu can see that the number of pages viewed per session is up by more than 100%-- people are looking at more than twice as many pages per visit.

 

Also of note is the Bounce Rate, for the period shown it is 35.58%.  This is the percentage of people who visit a page but leave without looking at any other pages.  This number is much better than it has been historically. 

 

In fact, for the the month of July the pages per session is over 5 and the bounce rate is under 7%!  This is, if I must say so myself, a remarkable achievement given the very hostile environment I have to operate in.

 

Now I KNOW Google can snatch this away and anytime.  In fact if you look carefully, and the graphs of the bounce rate and pages per session, you will see relative abrupt changes.  This is usually reflective of a Google algorithm change.  Now in this instance this change was in AALBC.com's favor, but it very easily could have gone the other way. 

 

 

halfmillion-pageviews.png 

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