A recent Business Insider “Chart of the Day” broke down the various ways that people share content on the Web.
Of those surveyed, 24 percent use Facebook as their primary content-sharing method. The “other” category accounted for 11.4 percent, followed by e-mail (11.1 percent), and Twitter (10.8 percent).
Knowing how people use the Web to share information is important for news organizations as they experiment with new approaches to disseminating their content. It’s often difficult, however, for news organizations to accurately track the extent to which content-sharing sites drive people to their Web sites.
Search Engine Optimization guru Danny Sullivan (no relation) recently tracked Twitter transfer referrals and found that analytics programs sometimes under-report the numbers of referrals.
Sullivan reported:
“Based only on referrers, at best, Google or any analytics program would have said Twitter sent two visits. But because I used tracking codes, I was able to overcome the lack of referring data and see that Twitter (itself or via applications or web sites using Twitter data) sent nine visits. That means analytics packages might be undercounting Twitter visits by nearly 500 percent.
“Meanwhile, Bit.ly was showing those 58 clicks to the page. Let’s say it wasn’t filtering out some of the robots. I can still see that there are 32 visits that the log files recorded, all with the tracking codes that never existed until I tweeted the link with them. So those are all Twitter-derived visits. That means an undercount by a standard analytics tool depending on referrer data by 1600 percent.”
Given that Twitter is high up on the list of content-sharing sites, it helps to keep these findings in mind.
