Does Twitter or Facebook Drive More Traffic to Your Blog?

Have you ever visited a discount book store and looked at books sitting on shelves and trestle tables gathering dust, begging to be read.

These are books that languished in a proper book store only to be banished to a clearance outlet.

These lonely unread tomes are the work of writers that have poured their heart, soul and time into their writing, with the hope of it being read and maybe with the faint promise of it becoming a best seller.

Their is nothing more depressing for a blogger than to write an article and publish it and no one turns up to read it.

A book and a blog post needs readers and they require promotion, marketing and sharing.

Social media has provided digital publishers the means to promote and share their content with the world’s 2 billion internet users easily and instantly. Sharing the latest blog post on Facebook or Twitter is one of the quickest and easiest ways for bloggers to attract  readers to  their latest publication.

Should I Share on Twitter or Facebook?

The question often asked is which social media channels are the best for social sharing to drive traffic and page views for your posts.

Hubspot has just collected some data from 5,000 blogs that reveals the importance of Twitter and Facebook and discovered some facts that are maybe not expected for Facebook centric marketers.

Twitter Drives more Views than Facebook

Twitter is certainly revealed in this study as the prime driver of traffic and having a Retweet button on your blog makes it easy for people to share your content on Twitter.

The Numbers:

• Blog posts shared only on Twitter had 63% more page views than those shared on Facebook only
• Posts shared on Twitter only, had 117% more traffic than posts with no sharing
• Posts shared on Twitter and Facebook drove 160% more page views than a non-shared post

Sharing Increases Your Search Engine Optimization

How Google ranks the importance of a website or blog and how high it will appear in search results is based upon many factors.

One of the most important criteria is the number of other websites linking to your site. The more websites that link to your content and the more credible they are (a link from the New York Times will be more valuable than a link from a small company website)  gives Google a good idea how valuable your content is. This is called an inbound link (an example of this is the link to Hubspot that I have included in this blog post).

This study revealed that combined sharing on Twitter and Facebook increased inbound links by 149% more than a post not shared at all, so  therefore increasing the search engine ranking value to Google and other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo.

Facebook Shares Create more Comments

Bloggers love receiving comments as it indicates that someone cares enough about your content to actually take the time to write a response. Comments are also extremely valuable as it provides valuable feedback for bloggers as to whether their content is resonating with their readers.

Facebook sharing was shown to produce more comments than Twitter. Also posts received 55% more comments when shared on the Twitter and Facebook social platforms compared to no sharing at all.

What would have been interesting to see would have been the effects on page views with shares on Google+ and LinkedIn. These two social media channels with 50 million and  100 million plus users respectively also have significant impact on traffic.

I am finding that LinkedIn shares can often surpass my Facebook shares.

On my last post  ”6 Fantastic Facebook Marketing Infographics” the shares for my four social network share buttons were

• Twitter – 702 Retweets
• LinkedIn – 541 Shares
• Facebook – 136 Shares
• Google +1 Button – 19 Clicks

Now this doesn’t reveal the numbers of page views, but more sharing does drive more traffic.

So Twitter and Facebook are not the only channels you should be sharing on and LinkedIn is especially important if you are a B2B blogger.

Takeaways

• Sharing  is essential to increase views to a blog
• Multiple sharing to Twitter and Facebook is more effective than a single channel approach
• Include a LinkedIn Share Button especially if you are a B2B blogger
• Consider sharing on Google’s social channel Google+ as it now has 50 million users and continues to grow

If you have the time and resources consider sharing on other social media channels such as Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit.

So what drives the most traffic to your blog? Look forward to hearing your story!

More Reading

• Do Shared Links Last Longer on Twitter or Facebook
• How to Increase Your Blog Traffic by 55% with One Button
• 5 Motivations for Sharing Content
• 20 Ideas for Social Media Content that Engages
• Is it Better to Share on Google, Facebook or Twitter?
• 9 Questions to Ask your Customers When Creating Content

Image by Telstar Logistics