Category Archives: Traffic

Point to Point: Why SEO shouldn’t get the blame for boring headlines

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The Point to Point blog has an excellent article about how witty headlines and SEO can go hand-in-hand. Dominic Litten explains how many news sites have the ability to put the SEO-friendly headline in a separate field to the witty headline.

For many journalists, SEO = headline + keyword stuffing. It’s all they know. However, if journalists really want to know and understand how SEO can help them and their publications they should worry a lot less about the importance of headlines and focus on their company’s sitemaps, site architecture, endless duplicate content, internal linking and the like.

Litten goes on to say:

We get the love for your headlines, we’re just over it. SEO didn’t kill the cute headline, the click did. The sheer volume of content, growing exponentially and shared on social media, rendered the witty and non-descriptive headline useless. We consume media so radically differently than we once did, so why are some  journalists clinging to out-dated best practices?

The full article is at this link.

Ten pros and cons for Facebook comments

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This tweet inspired a conversation:

http://twitter.com/#!/baekdal/status/65699876276666368

It is 10 weeks since Facebook overhauled its comments system, which allows websites to install a plugin to enable anyone logged into a Facebook account or with a Yahoo ID to comment.

The comment also appears in on friends’ news feeds on Facebook so has the potential to drive additional web traffic.

So what are the pros and cons?

1. More comments

Denmark-based Thomas Baekdal, founder and editor-in-chief of Baekdal.com, a business magazine about new media, media strategies, and trends, and 42concepts.com, a design magazine, has found the switch from commenting system Disqus to Facebook’s plugin has paid off by increasing comments by 800 per cent. But he has only switched one of his two sites. He added the widget for Facebook Comments for 42concepts.com but not to Baekdal.com.

This is an important thing to keep in mind. I did not change the commenting system for the business section – only for the design articles. There is a huge difference between the two – both on audience, and market.

The design content is also less about creating articles, and more about a “visual experience”. They are specifically designed to tell the story through the images. This makes 42Concepts the perfect target for people on Facebook.

Stories like this lovely example on the ‘yarnbombing’ of potholes.

Facebook Comments resulted in 10,000 comments in the first 30 days for showbiz, entertainment and media news site Digital Spy. That’s an average of 333 comments a day.

Tom Miller, community manager, told Journalism.co.uk that Digital Spy was not using a comments system (such as Disqus) before introducing Facebook Comments and encouraged commenting by directing readers from their forums, which are among the 25 most popular forums worldwide with 50 million posts, according to Miller.

2. Quantity doesn’t mean quality

Baekdal said Facebook Comments works for content that is suited to ‘snacking’.

We all know the Facebook behaviour encourages snacking (while Twitter is far more serious). The quality of comments also reflects that. Most of them are, ‘woooo!!!’, ‘omg!!’, ‘nice’, ‘cute’, ‘g0oo0o00o0od’, etc.

People do not actually comment, they express a feeling. There are no discussions.

But the result is staggering. As I tweeted, I have seen a 800 per cent increase in comments.

3. Increased web traffic

Web traffic is up for 42concepts.com as a result, Baekdal said.

Because each comment is shared on Facebook by default, the traffic from Facebook is up 216 per cent (but still only accounts for two per cent of the total traffic whereas StumbleUpon accounts for 62 per cent).

So have comments driven traffic to Digital Spy? Miller said:

I don’t think we can attribute traffic directly to Facebook Comments, but we did just have a record month with 9.84 million unique users in April.

4. Comments are attributed to a person

One big difference from using a system like Disqus is that Facebook comments are always attributed to a person, weeding out spam but also potentially reducing commenting from people who like to hide behind anonymity.

Digital Spy said Facebook’s commenting system is partly self-policing in nature. “People aren’t too controversial as they know mother-in-law will be reading what they write,” Miller said.

Baekdal told Journalism.co.uk that he’s only deleted one comment so far.

5. Comments with bad language are hidden

Facebook Comments has a language stalker tool which immediately hides comments with bad language. You can also opt to apply a grammar filter to add punctuation and expand “plz” to please and dont to “don’t”.

6. Moderation can take time

Digital Spy has found that moderating 10,000 comments a month takes time with four administrators taking half an hour whenever they can to post-moderate. Baekdal, on the other hand, only occasionally checks comments and spends an average of  just 30 seconds a day scrolling through.

Larger organisations like MTV and ITV outsource a service such as eModeration to cope with the number or comments.

7. It lends itself to post-moderation

Both Miller and Baekdal post-moderate and many news sites prefer pre-approval of comments to offer more content and legal control

8. You can enter the discussion

“Another advantage is that you have your Facebook page linked to your account,” Miller said, so that if two people are having an argument you can add a post. “It’s amazing, people do listen,” he added.

9. The backend system of Facebook Comments not user friendly

Miller said the backend of the Facebook system is “a bit of a mess” but believes Facebook will improve. “You can’t always see what article the comments have been posted to,” Miller explained.

“That is certainly true,” added Baekdal. “Administrating Facebook Comments is not a usable experience. It’s engineered, it is not designed to fit into people’s workflows. It’s very hard to see where a comment goes. It hard to track, it takes a lot of steps to moderate.”

10. It is suitable for ‘snackable content’ but not for all types of site

Baekdal has this advice based on thinking about his two websites:

I would advise people to test it. But as a strategy, I think Facebook comments fits well with “snackable content” and content that invokes feelings. I do not think it would work well for a site like the Financial Times.

Find out how to add Facebook Comments here.

To install Facebook Comments into WordPress click here.

Related articles:

Facebook: Our Comments Plugin Increases Publisher Traffic up to 45 per cent [STATS], from ReadWriteWeb.

Disqus has this month revealed it is doubling in size with investment of $10 million despite Facebook Comments, according to this article on the ReadWriteWeb technology blog, and its CEO is not worried about the threat of Facebook, says a Venture Beat article.

In the same way as you can @mention and refer to someone on Twitter, you can now do so on Disqus. It has since released @mentions, which “allows you to pull people into new conversations by mentioning them in your comments”, according to the Disqus blog, and follows Facebook @mentions, released in 2009,

YouTube founders buy Twitter and Facebook analytics client

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Two of the founders of YouTube who bought social bookmarking site Delicious less than a fortnight ago have announced that they have now acquired Tap11, a service that measures what is being said about a brand or business on Facebook and Twitter.

AVOS is a new internet company set up Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who started YouTube, selling it to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and it appears its two acquisitions will complement one another as they see “strong synergy” between the two platforms.

“Our vision is to create the world’s best platform for users to save, share, and discover new content,” said Hurley in a statement. “With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyse their links’ impact in real-time.”

So what is Tap11?

Tap11 has a similar layout to other third-party Twitter and Facebook clients, such as TweetDeck. When users post messages using the platform Tap11 analyses the reaction. You can monitor your brand, competing brands, plus individual campaigns and tweets and sort those reading your tweets by Klout score, a measure of online influence.

It is currently free for a trial period but your are required to register and users will later have to pay a monthly subscription.

According to AVOS, Tap11 currently works with more than 500 major brands, media companies, and agencies. Twitter selected Tap11 as a top six app at their Chirp conference. The platform is also a Webby Award winner.

How is it useful to journalists?

News websites could use Tap11 as a way of measuring what is being said about them on Twitter and Facebook, how many click-throughs, retweets and mentions each story gets and per-tweet analytics shown in easy to read graphs and charts.

‘Like Twitter on steroids’: New social network XYDO launches in beta

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Digg gets drunk, has a threesome with Reddit and Newsboiler, which results in XYDO.

That’s how social news network XYDO, which launched in public beta yesterday, was described in one tweet.

XYDO on Twitter

Jeffrey Bates, co-founder of Slashdot.org, opted for:

If Reddit and Hacker News are social news 2.0, XYDO is clearly 3.0 and beyond.

And author Jesse Stay likened it to “Quora meets Digg” and “Twitter on steroids”, according to XYDO’s website.

If you’ve used Digg, Reddit, Newsboiler and Quora, that’s all you need to know. If not, read on.

XYDO takes a bit of getting used to and I’ve not come across any handy video guides, but the following should help you find your way around.

What is XYDO?

XYDO is a social news network that takes stories from your Twitter and Facebook feeds. Users then collectively prioritise and organise stories by pushing them up or down the list. The ranking is influenced by clicking the green arrow up, the red arrow down and by sharing on Twitter and Facebook.

XYDO ranking

You will automatically be following the people you follow on Twitter and you will be assigned to various communities based on your Twitter connections.

You can view either news from your ‘connections’ or from your ‘communities’ and get a story list in a form which suits you: by custom RSS, email, tweeted links or Facebook.

So what does XYDO mean for journalists and newsrooms?

It is a source of stories. It is a way of networking, discussing stories and tailor-making your own news story feed.

You can also join communities (like ‘media and journalism’, which is already set up) and even create your own community.

It is also a way of increasing site traffic. You can submit stories, which will then be ranked by others on XYDO.

XYDO screengrab

You can follow @xydoapp on Twitter. “Media experts” from XYDO also curate various communities on Twitter channels. You can follow @x_mediajourn for “the best news and blog posts on the topic of media and journalism”, for example.

Read more about XYDO on Mashable,  ReadWriteWeb and Musings from Sussex.

News sites can now add a Facebook ‘send’ button

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Facebook has launched a new plugin with great appeal to news sites.

“Send” is similar to the “like” function but allows Facebook users (and there are half a billion of them) to send a news story as a private message to an individual, a few friends or a group.

The “send” button can be added to a site’s sharing options, as the Washington Post has done here:

Send button

 

 

 

Or users can click the Facebook icon or ‘share’ button and they will then have the option to send the story as a private message.

Send as a message

 

 

A Facebook user may come across a gallery of marathon pictures on a news site and decide to “send” the link to everyone who sponsored them. Or a charity may want to “send” a news feature about a campaign to a particular group, which the members can then discuss privately.

Facebook message

According to this Facebook blog post, the ‘send’ button keeps people on your site.

The send button drives traffic by letting users send a link and a short message to the people that would be most interested. They don’t need to leave the web page they’re on or fill out a long, annoying form.

Compared to the alternatives, the send button has fewer required steps, and it removes the need to look up email addresses by auto-suggesting friends and groups.

A small group of news sites and brands launched their ‘send’ buttons yesterday.

Details of how to add the ‘send’ button to your site are at this link.

Brand Republic: ComScore data sees Mail Online overtake HuffPo

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ComScore unique visitors data for March suggests news and aggregation site the Huffington Post was overtaken by MailOnline in the same month the Post was sold to AOL for $315m, Brand Republic reports today.

According to the global market researcher, MailOnline achieved a 27 per cent rise in unique visitors between February and last month, to 39,635,000, while a 20 per cent lift at the Huffington Post took it to 38,429,000.

Both titles are still behind the New York Times through which, according to the report, saw traffic rise by 41 per cent to a record 61,964,000 unique users around the world.

See the full Brand Republic report here…

Mashable: Social media is reinvigorating the market for quality journalism

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Mashable says Twitter and Facebook are promoting quality journalism.

A recent survey of tweets with links to stories in the iPad-only newspaper the Daily demonstrated people are more likely to tweet hard news than softer stories, the article says.

The incentive to share quality content is simple: a person may be more likely to read gossip, but they may share a news piece to shape their followers’ perception of them.

They may even view it as a public service. I tend to believe it’s usually the former rather than the more altruistic latter.

As a result, news organizations producing quality journalism are being rewarded with accelerated growth in social referral traffic — in some cases, growing at a much faster pace than search referrals.

More notably, social media is enabling the citizenry to be active participants in producing journalism by giving them platforms to publish to the social audience.

This has made journalism more efficient and, in many ways, enhanced the quality of storytelling.

The post goes on to demonstrate how social media could provide a more engaged reader.

In a recent analysis of Mashable’s social and traffic data, I found that Facebook and Twitter visitors spent 29 per cent more time on Mashable.com and viewed 20 per cent more pages than visitors arriving via search engines. This may suggest a more engaged or exploratory reader, at least in terms of how much time they spend reading the content.

The article also predicts how Google’s +1, which adds a social recommendation layer to Google searches, and how +1 could influence the stories people share by ‘likes’ and tweets.

Though +1 isn’t a social network, it is certainly a big step toward building one. But perhaps most important is its implications for quality. The number of +1s on a story link affects its placement in search results.

Mashable’s full post is at this link

Mashable: How paywalls are changing social media strategies

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Mashable has taken a look at three paywalled sites: the Dallas Morning News, the Economist and the Honolulu Civil Beat.

It has talked to community editors on the titles about how they promote stories via social media without incurring the wrath of angry readers who follow links to then find they are blocked by a paywall.

Dallas Morning News

Travis Hudson, a Dallas Morning News web editor, manages the site’s Twitter account and Facebook fan page, where he shares both free and premium content.

Like any good social media strategist, transparency is key for Hudson.

He designates whether a link is behind the paywall when posting it on Facebook or Twitter.

The Economist

Social media helps the site reach subscribers, regular readers and new readers by the means most convenient to them, while providing an opportunity to spark discussions around the Economist’s coverage areas.

“Readers who are empowered to participate are likely to spend more time with the site, return more often and become more active advocates of our work,” [Mark Johnson, The Economist’s community editor] says.

With the metered model, Johnson and other web producers can share any articles on social networks without experiencing the backlash of readers’ inability to access the site. Perhaps more importantly, they’re able to bring in more traffic.

“Referrals to the site from social networks, and the pageviews generated by such referrals, have grown almost every month since our social strategy began,” Johnson says. “Nor is this growth slowing. If anything, it’s speeding up.”

Honolulu Civil Beat

Online-only local news site the Honolulu Civil Beat is coming up on the one-year anniversary of its launch.

Though content is and always has been free through email, the site initially gave only partial access to visitors who came through social networks.

Beginning January 2011, however, all visitors can read all articles until they visit regularly enough to be asked to become a member.

“We figured, if they’re reading us that much they would be happy to become a member, and we’d be happy to have them,” says Dan Zelikman, the Civil Beat‘s marketing and community host.

There is no specific threshold number. Rather, the site runs a custom program that asks a reader to subscribe based on how often and how much he or she reads.

“Basically, if you read a couple of times a week, it will take a while before we ask you to register,” Zelikman says.

Reading access aside, the Civil Beat’s subscription model fosters community by only allowing members to comment on articles. In addition, subscribers experience the site without advertising, a perk that’s particularly popular with the community.

Mashable’s full article is at this link.

Mashable: What impact has the NY Times paywall had on traffic?

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Mashable has been attempting to discover the impact of the New York Times metered-paywall on web traffic.

It is early days as the wall only went up on 28 March but the analysis suggests a reduction of between five and 10 per cent in traffic and a fall in pageviews by up to 30 per cent.

It is perhaps not surprising that pageviews have taken a greater hit as the metered-paywall model allows readers to access up to 20 articles a month free, so users may be deterred from clicking as many pages .

So here’s the big question: Is NYT’s paywall a success or a failure? When it comes to this big-picture question, we still don’t have enough information to make a conclusion. The paywall simply hasn’t been around long enough and we don’t have the financial data to see whether the paywall has made up for the loss in advertising revenue.

Mashable’s full article is at this link.