Social media is great for finding unique content from sources you might not otherwise visit — but loyalty still matters in the news business. That's according to new data from the Pew Research Journalism Project.
Readers who visit a publication's homepage spend nearly three times as long on the site as those who visit via Facebook or a web search, according to Pew's data.
Those loyal homepage users visit more than four times as many pages on the site in a given month, and visit the site overall nearly three times as often.
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News consumers who visit a publication's site by going to the homepage spend more time and read more stories than those who come via Facebook or an internet search.
Image: Pew Research Center
In other words, publications that can encourage readers to bookmark the homepage, and come back often, are generating more traffic than they can on Facebook.
According to the study:
Facebook and search are critical for bringing added eyeballs to individual stories, and they do so in droves. But the connection a news organization has with any individual coming to their website via search or Facebook seems quite limited. For news outlets operating under the traditional model of building a loyal, perhaps paying audience, obtaining referrals so that users think of the outlet as the first place to turn is critical.
Researchers found some interesting data about individual sites as well. For example, visitors to FOXNews.com spend an average of nearly eight minutes on the site, while visitors to CNN.com spend around 90 seconds — despite a higher number of site visits per month on average.
Buzzfeed gets 50% of its desktop/laptop traffic from Facebook, which is "low engagement, but high volume," according to the study.
Pew Research Center measured data over a three month period from 26 separate news organizations, including the top 15 sites with the most unique monthly visitors.
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