The Socialistic Interview: Yury Lifshits on the Importance of Facebook “Likes” (Excerpt)

March 17, 2011

The Socialistic Interview: Yury Lifshits on the Importance of Facebook “Likes”

The effects of social media on user engagement with news sites have become undeniable: Facebook and Twitter (and Reddit and Digg and many others…) have become major drivers of traffic for pretty much all content sites. So it’s become increasingly necessary to figure out what kinds of stories result in a flood of sharing and engagement, and which ones don’t.

A recent study by researcher Yury Lifshits, under the auspices of Yahoo Labs, looked at Facebook “like” stats for over 100,000 news articles published over three months, seeking to divine insights about the stickiness of content in social media.  Socialistic caught up with Lifshits recently to talk about his findings, and what they might mean for content sites as well as social media marketers.

What were some of the key findings from your study of how “likes” affect traffic to online news sites?  What are some of the major lessons for content creators?

I can not give well grounded advice here, as I only know the number of likes, not referral statistics from Facebook and Twitter. The feeling is that social referrals become a significant source of traffic. They may be around 1% for now, but can go to 10% or more.  Social referrals play a bigger role than it might appear. Epidemic coverage on Twitter initiates secondary coverage in media and blogs. Without Twitter there will be much less of that. Clicks from various social clients are not always attributed back to social networks.

Lesson #1: measure your success in social networks. Lesson #2: work to improve your social success. Lesson #3: use social feedback to adjust your editorial policy. Focus more on subjects and forms that readers like most. But of course, you should preserve your voice and integrity.

via socialistic.com

Read the full interview on socialistic.com

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales