One of the things I get from clients quite often is that they want to get on page one of Digg or they want lots of StumbleUpon visitors. While these sites can provide a staggering amount of traffic, the value of it can be highly variable depending on what your business is and how much value the audience gets from what you’re offering. Here’s a few things I’ve noticed about traffic from these sites.
- The vast majority of clicks are going to bounce instantly. Whether this is because these people are Digg addicts who open everything in a category or that you’re just not offering what they think they want, this is a hard fact. With a toolbar at the top of your site that gives them access to the next shiny thing on the internet, you’re having to struggle with a short attention span and an urge to see what else is out there.
- Short, on-message videos or funny pictures, charts, and graphs seem to work best. Your 50-page PDF about office organizational systems is not what they’re looking for, but a comic strip about someone’s travails in their new office environment might be.
- It’s completely possible for your site to get 50,000 or more visitors from Digg and not see a single conversion or even a click on an ad. Unless you’re selling a cheap item that’s relevant to their interest like ThinkGeek or offering an mp3 or the like that they can download and enjoy instantly, the siren song of the toolbar and the “next” button is likely to be stronger than your own call to action.
Social media can drive traffic to your site and build brand impressions, but in an increasingly noisy space where thousands of companies just like yours are competing using the same methods, it takes a savvy mind to be able to profit from that traffic.