LinkedIn Drives More Direct Blog Traffic Than Facebook, twitter or Google

Out of the many social network choices for reaching business professionals, LinkedIn stands clearly above Facebook, twitter, Google and email according to findings from a recent Blog-Off contest. LinkedIn dominated hands down with 55% of 2,350 directly referred URLs (separated from the 6,000+ total page views) over two weeks in a Blog-Off contest that involved 12 marketing and social media thought leaders. Facebook eked ahead of twitter with 13% of direct referring URL's versus 11% from the rapidly growing micro-blog site. 

Note:  Feel free to comment below on which social networks drive the most traffic to your website or blog. Have you had stellar experiences with Plaxo, Ecademy or something else?

Well known giant search engine Google referred 9% of the 2,350 segment up from 0.5% of traffic five months ago on the Community Marketing Blog. Email accounted for 6% of direct traffic tying with AlphaInventions.com at 6%.

The balance of traffic for over 3,650 page views was predominately referred by URL's that the authors had posted to other blogs or sources that TypePad was unable to identify. There were no additional social network segments that achieved greater than 0.5% of directly referred traffic. Referring blog sites from the individual authors formed the next greatest segment out of the 6,000+ total page views.


Insights From Statistics

- A growing trend appears to be reflected in the referring groups; 'business professionals prefer to get their news and thought leadership from business resources'. While Facebook may have over 200 million members versus Linkedn's 40 million it is clear the business audience is concentrated in LinkedIn.

- LinkedIn may have an even greater future ahead for sharing thought leadership, news, best practice, education and much more. Watch this space. Social networks find their tipping points and explosive growth when minor trends gain publicity and erupt in mass behaviour that stabilizes into social norms.

- While authors made good use of Facebook there is little question that in a business to business communication the best place to build relationships is either LinkedIn, twitter or email.

- Authors that participated predominately came from LinkedIn with a couple arriving from twitter. This likely biased data as Plaxo and Ecademy were not sourced for potential authors. At the same time none of the 12 authors appeared to involve these networks.

- There may be a loyalty factor with LinkedIn members as this group demonstrated they do not spread themselves to thin or to many other business networks (based on what the data indicates).

- Key blogs and social network relationships are the next greatest resource for building traffic, relationships and online community social media interactivity. This repesented over 30% of direct traffic (analysis is ongoing).

What are your thoughts and findings? Feel free to share below.

Ready to get started with social media? We are actively reviewing how hundreds of companies are working with social media and continuously applying what we learn. Presently we are able to reach over a million professionals without spending one dollar in cash through our social media networks. To obtain the support of this author for articles, speaking or launching a social media program contact Andrew Ballenthin, President of Sol Solutions – 416.317.7313 andrew@solsolutions.ca.

All rights reserved. © Sol Solutions 2009.

Comments

[Julie Tyios]

That's funny, because I was doing my own experiment with my articles - I wanted to see what kind of response I'd get promoting my articles through LinkedIn groups, veen though they were all about Twitter. I tried posting on some groups for marketers, some for Twitter users, and some for media professionals. I'd be curious to know the response breakdown, if that's available.

Julie

[Adam Wooten]

Interesting findings. Thanks for sharing. My own experience also shows that LinkedIn drives the most traffic to my blog. Frankly, I'm always surprised whenever I hear of anyone trying to use Facebook for B2B networking or sales. And, yes, I was also led to this blog post through a discussion on LinkedIn.

[Sean Nelson]

I'm a believer in LinkedIndriving blog traffic. I used it to take my monthly traffic to the www.linkedintuition.com/blog from 2,200 in March to over 20,000 in May.

[Subraya Mallya]

I have seen the same. LinkedIn drives the most traffic for me than Facebook, Twitter and organic combined. Digg is better than FB.

[Scott Howard]

Funnily enough, I discovered this blog through linkedin, which led me to following you on Twitter, and then to this post. I am now going to share on both twitter, linkedin, and our internal Yammer site. It will be interesting to see which of the networks generates the most meaningful reply.

[Laura Bramly]

LinkedIn definitely lets you target your peers directly. More than loyalty to businesspeople in general, I'd say there is a loyalty to one's network members. LinkedIn has become much more valuable to me than Facebook in terms of driving traffic to my blog and web site, with Twitter coming in second.

[Neil Warren]

Yep - it was all going great - we had them beating Google at one stage, and then in comes the new "action bar".

Just watching them plummet off the bottom of the charts, as we speak!

[Andres Heuberger]

Thanks for the good post! We have found that LinkedIn beats Facebook by a wide margin when it comes to bringing traffic to our blog. (The results of a test are at http://blog.fxtrans.com/2009/04/social-networking-in-translation.html.)

It may be that the kinds of connections being formed are different on LinkedIn and Facebook - personal on Facebook, more business oriented on LinkedIn. And it's the business-oriented folks that would be interested in blogs such as ours.

[Windenberger Claude]

Thanks for sharing your findings. I haven't spent enough time on linkedIn to come to the same conclusion. But I definitely will make it a priority now to see if I can (and I'll obviously not mind getting the resulting benefits from that).