It is no surprise to any publisher that many of the conversations about their content and within their audience are occurring off their properties. Increasingly, social hubs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg are found in the top 3 traffic drivers, and their influence is only likely to increase over time. At PostRank, we’ve been monitoring and recording all the off-site engagement since mid-2007 when we first launched our service. Since then, we’ve observed a number of interesting trends, which are worth paying attention to, especially if you are a publisher yourself.
In absolute terms, when we sample over the top 1000 of the most engaging feeds for the past three years, we see approximately a 30% year over year growth in engagement –- a sign that more people are participating in the social web. The “share, and like this” phenomenon, which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs, are all facilitating this trend.
Not surprisingly, as the mind-share of these social hubs grows, the conversations and discussions about the content are increasingly happening off the publisher’s property. Between 2007 and 2009, the amount of on-site engagement has dropped by over 50%, while the off-site engagement has skyrocketed!
Larger audiences & highly engaged communities
Looking across the different types of activity (PostRank’s 5Cs of Engagement), it is clear that trackbacks, which were previously the primary means of engaging in conversations, are becoming dwarfed by the lighter modes of engagement. From 2007 to 2009, the contribution of trackbacks to total engagement has dropped from 19% to 3%! In the meantime, channels such as Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have gone up from less than 1% to over 29%. For publishers, this is great news: larger audiences, more conversations, and more engaged communities. That is, as long as you have the tools to track this long tail of distributed conversations across the social web (shameless plug: PostRank Analytics).
Content Discovery & Distribution within the Social Web
An interesting side effect of the widespread adoption of more pervasive communication tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is the increased lifespan of a typical story. Back in 2007, we observed that over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article. Even more interestingly, the 98% of the engagement on that first day occurred within the first hour. In other words, the half-life of a story was, and still is, less than an hour!
Fast forward to 2008 and 2009, and we’re seeing a steady increase in the lifespan of a story: down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009. While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency, the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. What we’re observing are the effects of strengthening the weak ties.
Engaging with the Social Web
The social web is growing fast. With 30% year over year growth we can expect both the number of people and the amount of their participation to steadily increase, which will translate into more feedback loops for the publishers. At the same time, the “share this” phenomenon shows no signs of stopping, and the deployment of “one click participation” mechanisms such as Twitter’s new retweet functionality, or Facebook’s “like” button, means that each one of us is becoming (if not already) a content curator. In other words, the distribution of content is becoming truly distributed.
Anyone who worries about the monoculture effect of niche networks should breathe a sigh of relief — the data indicates the complete opposite. Even as we organize ourselves into micro-networks of interests, the weak ties that everyone brings are helping the content to travel further and over longer periods of time. Increased lifespan of a story from 2007 to 2009 is case in point.
The challenge: while the consumers are trying to wade their way through the abundance of content, very few publishers understand how to properly engage with the social web. After all, if over 50% of the engagement happens in the first hour, which is also definitely not driven by Google, then how do you optimize and better engage with your audience? Fire and forget is not a strategy, and as random as the behaviour of these social networks may seem, there is a method to the madness.
How do you do it?