Online video consumption and social networking are growth areas in terms of end user engagement, it is clear. When you exclude just Facebook from the rest of the Web, consumption in terms of minutes of use shrank by nearly nine percent between March 2010 and March 2011, according to data from comScore.
And, even when you include Facebook usage, total non-mobile Internet consumption still dropped three percent over the same period.
The important news is that Facebook usage does not seem to be adding to Internet engagement time. Facebook is displacing time spent with other Web apps.
As many will note, social media and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top 25 consumer news sites studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic.
Twitter barely registerd as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links. See http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same trends will hold for business-to-business content. One suspects search engines will still drive half or more of delivered visitors.
The Pew data on consumer news sites shows 60 percent to 65 percent of traffic is “direct.” In my experience that is not true of B2B traffic, where it can easily be the case that half or more of traffic comes from search engines.
Still, the overall comScore data suggests that people have changed the way they use Internet apps.
At a high level, one might say that the legacy “searchable Web” is either being replaced by, or augmented by, “the social Web.” What’s the difference? Maybe something as simple as connections between pages being replaced by connections between people.
The implications for content publishers could be important. Up to this point, one of the requirements for online content has been its ability to be found. So digital media publishers create lots of content around top keywords, engineer for search engine optimization (SEO) and expand the surface area in search engines to reach more users.
Some might argue that SEO’s strategic value is quickly fading as Google’s growth slows and its prominence in distribution slides away. Some of us might argue that is a good thing. Too often, SEO techniques are applied in ways that actually make content less useful. Writing for an algorithm is not the same thing as writing for a person.
Links embedded as an SEO technique often do not add much, if any, value. And the need to repeat “keywords” in body copy runs counter to traditional good writing techniques, which call for varying terms so no one word is used too frequently. But SEO calls for repeating keywords often in body copy. So less emphasis on SEO would strike some of us as a welcome change.
Still, the point, some would argue, is that Facebook has become the hub of the connected Web, a new “home base” that might have been anchored by Google’s home page over the last decade.
Facebook began receiving as many visits as Google in March 2010, and already garners more than three times as many minutes as Google each month from users, according to comScore.
Looking ahead, the best projections of U.S. online reach indicate that Facebook will surpass Google on that metric in less than a year, too.
And with this change, the nature of the relationship between users and publishers is being altered. Search offers a utility relationship, connecting users to content for the briefest of transactions; typically, it provokes users to just one page view so they can find a piece of information, and then they move on.
Social discovery arguably can build a relationship. By definition, a bit of content or a site found using a social mechanism already has some “connection” operating, between one user and another, or between one user and a community.
At least in principle, social discovery had enhance a relationship more than a “search” function can. At least, that’s the theory. See http://allthingsd.com/20110623/the-web-is-shrinking-now-what/?refcat=voices.
Facebook’s new popularity doesn’t mean brands can dispense with content published on their own sites. Facebook, after all, is used as a way to point to the original source. But there is clear logic to create ways to automatically create Facebook posts when a new bit of content is published.
And, even when you include Facebook usage, total non-mobile Internet consumption still dropped three percent over the same period.
The important news is that Facebook usage does not seem to be adding to Internet engagement time. Facebook is displacing time spent with other Web apps.
As many will note, social media and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top 25 consumer news sites studied by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic.
Twitter barely registerd as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links. See http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same trends will hold for business-to-business content. One suspects search engines will still drive half or more of delivered visitors.
The Pew data on consumer news sites shows 60 percent to 65 percent of traffic is “direct.” In my experience that is not true of B2B traffic, where it can easily be the case that half or more of traffic comes from search engines.
Still, the overall comScore data suggests that people have changed the way they use Internet apps.
At a high level, one might say that the legacy “searchable Web” is either being replaced by, or augmented by, “the social Web.” What’s the difference? Maybe something as simple as connections between pages being replaced by connections between people.
The implications for content publishers could be important. Up to this point, one of the requirements for online content has been its ability to be found. So digital media publishers create lots of content around top keywords, engineer for search engine optimization (SEO) and expand the surface area in search engines to reach more users.
Some might argue that SEO’s strategic value is quickly fading as Google’s growth slows and its prominence in distribution slides away. Some of us might argue that is a good thing. Too often, SEO techniques are applied in ways that actually make content less useful. Writing for an algorithm is not the same thing as writing for a person.
Links embedded as an SEO technique often do not add much, if any, value. And the need to repeat “keywords” in body copy runs counter to traditional good writing techniques, which call for varying terms so no one word is used too frequently. But SEO calls for repeating keywords often in body copy. So less emphasis on SEO would strike some of us as a welcome change.
Still, the point, some would argue, is that Facebook has become the hub of the connected Web, a new “home base” that might have been anchored by Google’s home page over the last decade.
Facebook began receiving as many visits as Google in March 2010, and already garners more than three times as many minutes as Google each month from users, according to comScore.
Looking ahead, the best projections of U.S. online reach indicate that Facebook will surpass Google on that metric in less than a year, too.
And with this change, the nature of the relationship between users and publishers is being altered. Search offers a utility relationship, connecting users to content for the briefest of transactions; typically, it provokes users to just one page view so they can find a piece of information, and then they move on.
Social discovery arguably can build a relationship. By definition, a bit of content or a site found using a social mechanism already has some “connection” operating, between one user and another, or between one user and a community.
At least in principle, social discovery had enhance a relationship more than a “search” function can. At least, that’s the theory. See http://allthingsd.com/20110623/the-web-is-shrinking-now-what/?refcat=voices.
Facebook’s new popularity doesn’t mean brands can dispense with content published on their own sites. Facebook, after all, is used as a way to point to the original source. But there is clear logic to create ways to automatically create Facebook posts when a new bit of content is published.
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