Over the years social media has evolved to become one of the most significant sources of referral traffic, but have you ever wondered about the behavior of these visitors post click? According to a recent study conducted by Shareaholic, YouTube supplies the most engaged viewers to brand partners through referral traffic. Interestingly, the post click engagement delivered by Facebook lags far behind YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Source: Shareaholic
The website analyzed 200,000 websites with more than 250 million unique monthly visitors for a period of 6 months (September 2013-February 2014) and delivered the following six significant findings:
- Youtube drives the most engaged traffic with the lowest average bounce rate of 43.19%, the highest pages per visit (2.99) and the longest visit duration of 227.82 seconds. The reason behind the high engagement of visitors from YouTube can be dedicated to the fact that videos are very engaging in themselves and viewers maintain a similar level of engagement with related content.
- Google+ and LinkedIn draws the least social referrals but they drive some of the best visitors. Google+ users spend a little more than 3 minutes viewing things shared by friends in their circle, visit 2.45 pages during each visit and bounce only 50.63% of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, view 2.23 pages on each visit and bounce 51.28% of the time.
- Both Twitter and Facebook bounce 56.35% of the time with Facebook users spending more time on a site post-click (127.44 seconds) than Twitter (123.10). Twitter however sweeps the boards in pages per visit category (2.15 vs 2.03).
- Although Pinterest users bounce as frequently as the Facebook and Twitter users, they view comparatively fewer pages per visit (1.71) and spend considerably less time on site (64.67 seconds) than all other platforms except StumbleUpon.
- Reddit is a tough nut to crack with users spending a little less than 2 minutes on a site post click, visit 1.58 pages during each visit and the highest bounce rate of 70.16%.
- StumbleUpon drives the minimum engaged referrals. Users view only 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site.
