How much traffic do we get from social media?

We use social media a lot. We run a bunch of Twitter accounts, which automatically post headlines and discussion posts. Twitter's great at news headlines: and not surprisingly, Twitter does pretty well at delivering traffic to us. @mediaukradio has 8,829 followers at the time of writing, as one example, and so far we've posted nearly 30,000 tweets there.

But we were interested at a quick review of how we've done for the more manual use of social media that we do, rather than the automated stuff; so, here's the results of some datamining we've done.

Below, we've filtered our incoming traffic for Media UK opinion pieces since September: like this review of Google Play Magazines, or this plea for more personalities on the radio. If you've come to this blog post without knowing about Media UK, you might want to know that our traffic is almost 90% based in the UK, and therefore this little exercise is a worthwhile snapshot of how UK folks use social media.

For each of these pieces, we'll manually post a message on our @mediauk Twitter account (10,022 followers); our Facebook account (1,703 likes); our Google+ page (247 +1s), and our LinkedIn page (er, 22 followers). Additionally, I share these on my personal accounts - on Twitter (7,025 followers); Facebook (780 friends+subscribers); Google+ (I'm in 930 peoples' circles) and LinkedIn ("500+" connections). Every piece therefore gets, at least initially, the same amount of promotion on all four social media services. The messages are also tailored specifically for each service (there is no cross-posting).

I've added a "reach" figure - how many people might reasonably see these posts. This is whatever's highest in terms of Media UK's own accounts or mine; since I suspect there's a significant level of overlap between them, so adding them together wouldn't be too fair.



So, for articles, Twitter is still significantly ahead of any other social network in terms of raw traffic figures. But once you start to look at the efficiency - Facebook blows Twitter away, being almost four times as good at pointing traffic to the website.

Google+ appears flawed for businesses, to my mind: at least for a UK audience. It appears difficult to engage audiences there, not least because of a clunky interface getting there and still almost no mobile support. It's significantly less efficient to post here than it is on Twitter; and coupled with Google+'s significantly low penetration, it's questionable whether this is a relevant place to continue posting on.

And the least we say about LinkedIn the better.