Facebook is the most valuable source of traffic
Between search engines and social media, there are a lot of different ways that people can get to your website. But which of these sources provides loyal users that come back to your site multiple times?
That’s the subject of a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September.
According to their findings, Facebook provides the most loyal visitors, with 20% of those that originate from the social network in turn visiting the site they landed upon four or more times in a week. Among other social media sites, Digg traffic produced loyal users 16% of the time, while Twitter traffic was only good for 11% loyalty.
In the realm of search engines, Yahoo provides the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with around 12% each.
The finding that social sites provide stickier traffic isn’t surprising, but what implications do the loyalty rankings for Facebook, Digg, and Twitter have, if any? Perhaps that in the long-run, encouraging your visitors to share on Facebook might have the most value, even if it doesn’t provide the most short-term traffic.
That said, it’s easy enough to provide sharing options for a multitude of social media sites (case in point, this post!), so you can probably file this under the “nice to know” category of statistics and use your own analytics to gauge what is and isn’t working.
See the original article at Mashable.
Trend Tracker sees emerging Twitter trends
Finding the hot conversation keeps getting easier, but predicting what the next big trend will be continues to be a crapshoot. Palm and Federated Media have teamed up to create a new tool called Trend Tracker that does its best to figure out, what in fact the next top trend will be by analyzing items that are gathering buzz.
The system is a mix of tools that can help spot popular URLs and trending topics before they hit it big. But it’s more about organizing that data in a simple-to-parse format.
Included are the current top 30 trending topics on Twitter, which can be stacked up against each other to see what’s pulling in the highest percentage of tweets. Each trend is represented over a 24-hour time line, where you can see how each particular trend has gone up or down in popularity.
But 24 hours doesn’t tell the full story, which is why the tool will soon expand to keep an archive that covers the last 10 or 30 days.
Along with the top 30 trends, Trend Tracker includes a “Pre Trend Watch” which tracks five up-and-coming trends that are about to break into the top 10 based on their velocity–the speed in which tweets on that particular topic are gaining in popularity. These are also marked in the trend archive with a little blue flag.
When I was looking at the tool last week, one of the most interesting things this picked up on was the cyclical nature of trending. Words like “sleep” and “night” picked up speed and prominence depending on the time of day. Using Trend Tracker’s frequency graph, you’re able to look at the last 24 hours, and see what time of day they began to rise or fall in use–that’s not something you can see through Twitter proper.
To add to that, there’s also a map layer that shows you an animated view of where tweets in any particular trend originated. Again, in the case of “sleep” and “night” you could play back an entire day of activity and see a huge cluster of when the word or phrase gained its prominence.
For most people I’m guessing Trend Tracker will be something they play with a few times and forget, but there’s some real value here over Twitter’s own trend highlighting offerings. If you want to see when and where something originated, as well as how popular it was at any given time of day, this offers both sets of data and in a very easy to use format; you don’t even need to do any detective work in Twitter’s search engine to find that out.
See the original article at CNET News.
Voyeurism in the Twitter age
Often when people tweet or post a Facebook status update from the road they accompany it with a picture or two. These photos can range form the mundane to the fascinating with a bit of everything in between. While you may not be viewing the status updates yourself, the pictures are usually posted to a publically available service like Twitpic, yFrog, TwitrPix and others.
A site called PicFog grabs the links to these photos in real-time and presents them in a constantly updated webpage (see the photo). If you want to kill a few minutes just open up the site and let photos scroll by. Each photos has additional information associated with it, and clicking on the photo opens up a larger photo.
It’s all public although it tends to be a little creepy sometimes. That said, it’s definitely worth a look for a few minutes of mindless entertainment.
PostRank combines Google Analytics with social media stats
Traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics are a great for both small and large bloggers and publishers. However, traffic data can only tell you so much.
As conversations surrounding blog posts start to take in place other places (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and people use tumble blogs like Tumblr and Posterous to quickly comment and share helpful information, tracking that data and its correlation to overall traffic numbers can become really, really helpful.
For smaller publishers or bloggers, getting all of this information in one place can be difficult. Today, PostRank is publicly launching PostRank Analytics as a way to capture social engagement and traditional metrics all in one place.
When you sign-up for a PostRank Analytics account, you just need to enter in your blog address and connect your Google Analytics account. You can also enter in your Twitter username, so that your Twitter follower stats can be monitored in tandem with your web traffic.
What PostRank Analytics does is take the Google Analytics data and show you the pageviews, Twitter followers and “engagement score” for the day before. You can see how your figures stand up over time, by week, month or quarter.
See the full article at Mashable.
Ning’s Social Networks Get Their Own App Platform
Ning, the social network for social networks, recently hit the 1 million networks milestone. But with such a huge user base comes huge user demand for additional features and functionality.
Today, Ning is about to deliver some of that functionality to their 700,000 social network creators with Ning Apps, giving them more than 90 new toys — think apps like Qik, Twitter, Ustream, Box.net, Tokbox, WordPress, Mailchimp, and PollDaddy — that they can use to enhance their individual networks. 
The new apps aren’t just social in nature, but impressively functional, combining passion and purpose for all niche audiences. So groups that want to create their own store or sell items (like music) can select from 10 different e-commerce apps. Networks looking to collaborate can tap into 18 different options like wikis, file storage (via Box.net), docs (via Google Docs), video chat (via ToxBox), and whiteboards (via Huddle).
We’ve included a partial list below, but we think a few key apps of note are Cartfly, Wildfire, and Tickets by Ticketmaster. Cartfly will enable any social network creator to create a custom store front to sell merchandise. Wildfire can be used by the social causes crowds to raise funds and create challenges. And Tickets by Ticketmaster (LiveNation and Amiando have apps too) will make it possible for big (and small) ticket bands to promote their shows and sell tickets.
See more at Mashable.
