I took a left, it took a left, and my right was met by a pause from the big-eyed digital waitress who left a…
Why StumbleUpon is the real king of social
Yes, you heard right — pound for pound, StumbleUpon drives more than 50% of social media traffic in the US! In August alone, StumbleUpon topped the social media charts for the most traffic referrals by a large margin – to be exact, these are the market share percentages:
- StumbleUpon: 50.34%
- Facebook: 37.4%
- Reddit: 4.26%
- Twitter: 3.23%
- YouTube: 3.19%
What’s more, after 24 hours a popular shared link will typically get
And the half-life of a link (i.e. the point in time when a link has garnered half of the engagement it will ever get) is even more drastic:
Drilling further down the engagement stats, the average Stumble page view lasts 72 seconds, nearly 25% longer than the average web page view (58 seconds), and the average StumbleUpon session (during which a user views page after page) last 69 minutes — more than three times the average Facebook session — and three times the length of the average TV sitcom!
The reason why StumbleUpon scores so high in social engagement is that as a source of traffic it maximizes the three mission critical success factors marketers are looking for:
- Getting to know you: Like other social media sites, there is the social element to StumbleUpon. But what sets it head and shoulders above the rest of the social media is the way it is focused like a laser, directly onto people interested in your particular niche.
- Getting people to like you: It is human nature to like people who share the same interest, so again StumbleUpon scores a top mark.
- Building trust: Without trust, there can be no sale. And this is where the unique mix of StumbleUpon – tightly targeted groups centred around your niche plus the ability to provide genuine social proof — builds trust (and sales) faster than any other medium.
The reason behind this is that StumbleUpon is built around the concept of structuring groups and communities around shared interests. So, for example, if you are in the dog‐training niche, you will specify dogs as one of your interests and you will become part of a group of people who love dogs.
And, other than the social network likes of Facebook and Twitter, almost all content on StumbleUpon is generated by recommendations from the user community and especially the group members.
StumbleUpon lets you delve deep into the psyche of your audience by allowing you to see exactly what their interests are. You can see what sites people like, what they think isn’t worth their time and more.
Interestingly, most of these nearly 500 interested groups match the passion niches where online marketers generate most revenue. These include cooking (7.3 million active audience), health (4.8 million active audience), Internet (6.4 million active audience) and video games (4.9-million active audience).
The next post in this series will examine how best to leverage the engagement power of StumbleUpon to convert visitors into loyal fans and monetize the traffic generated.
