JumpTime

Paid Content published an article today that pointed out some of the findings of the Pew Research Center’s 2012 State of the News Report, namely that social media is not driving as much of the news consumption as we may be lead to believe.

Our work at JumpTime with several news publishers corroborates those results. Indeed, most referrals to news websites come from search engines (and people accessing the site directly). However, there is another piece to this puzzle that deserves attention. While less referrals come in from social media, the value of these referrals to the publisher is typically a lot higher than the value of referrals from search engines. A visitor that follows a social media referral is more likely to become engaged with the publisher’s highest value content, consuming more high value pages, and thus generating more revenue for the publisher than the average visitor coming in through a search referral.

JumpTime calculated the average “FloPower” value (the total $ value of a visit to a page, including both the revenue of that page plus the revenue of all the pages that follow) for different referral types for different publishers, and the results consistently point to a much higher $ value for social media referrals. These insights have helped our publishers rethink their marketing strategies, re-assessing the balance between SEO and Social Media Optimization in order to achieve the best possible ROI on marketing action. – Anke Audenaert