21 Apr Social Media Referrers. The Analytics Talk

Referrers are important on many different fronts.  Social media opportunities serve as good incoming link bait for the rest of your web site content.

As for a Source and Medium listing of this blog, the following referral sources…

1.  Wikipedia:  Offers a great contextual source.  If your site has relevant information to a listing on their site, then you may be able to offer your site as a resource.  The cons are:  Content is editable at any time, so your link may be removed.  Also, the links are “NOFOLLOW” which means that search engine bots typically won’t follow your link for spidering purposes.

2.  Google:  as a referral, a search engine is always a great origin of traffic.  Once you see in your analytics that you have traffic for a particular keyword, then your next steps are to see what keywords you are indexed for and figure out how you could benefit from that listing.  Also, you can determine if further optimization of that content is called for, in order to rank higher.

3.  Direct:  This is normally bookmarked traffic and/or direct type-ins.  For this traffic, you want to make sure that you have a memorable domain name.  This will help to increase this type of referral.

4.  LinkedIn:  For my referrals here, I  gain this traffic two-fold.  One is by adding my blog URL to my profile.  And two, by automating WordPress content updates in the form of Posting Title updates.  (Whenever I blog, a new title posts up on LinkedIn)

5.  Twitter:  My blog posts are automatically Tweeted.  This lets my friends click through and read the latest “hot air” 🙂

6.  Mail:  This is an interesting referral.  Normally, you would see more mail referrals when you send out an email blast or newsletter.  In this instance, this is presumably someone who emailed another person with a link to my site.  (It was not me, so this is a great presumption, to think that someone would actually forward a link 🙂  )

You can also add mail function buttons to your posts or site, which will allow someone to mail the article from your site.

7.  Bing:  As an “early adopters” search engine, it is cool to get traffic from here.  Love the fact that Bing has me indexed!

8.  Digg:  Ok.  So this one is a small surprise.  Why?  Because I have not been as faithful at submitting content to Digg, and to me, it seems hard to get good diggs.  But at any rate, sign up for Digg and add Digg buttons to your post.

9.  Facebook:  Well, as my professional Facebook does not have many friends yet, it is no surprise that it would be down near the bottom of my referring list.  Also, this could be because those who do TRY, are given a weird message that they are leaving Facebook.  The message, as I recall, almost makes leaving Facebook for this, a hard thing.

For a new blog, this is great that it is getting a variety of traffic referrals.  It can always be improved.

Remember, more incoming links entails better possible traffic and SEO.  It also, if my content is engaging enough, allows a viral social aspect of my content.  If it is important, it will be retweeted, forwarded, blogged about, and in this case… linked and referred to.