Monday, February 05, 2007

Why Social Networking Traffic is So Fleeting

Social sites like Digg and Reddit, if their homepage links to you, can bring you thousands upon thousands of visitors. For about an hour. And suddenly, right after the world seemed righteous and just in bringing you to the pinnacle of fame, the traffic subsides and you are again dumped into the lonely dredges of small bloggerdom. But why does this happen. Why is it, that other types of traffic, lets says from search engines do provide some sort of lasting traffic or *gasp* feed subscribers. Well lets look at it this way. Digg user's consume media. They look at Digg for little bits of information, and consult Digg for more and more information. Just because they came to your blog and got a little bit of information, does not mean that they want to get more information from you in the future. Unless of course you make it to the front page of Digg again. This is analogous to the book world. I read a lot of books over the course of the year, and very rarely do I read two books by the same author. Unless the author has something extraordinary to say, and says it in a captivating way, I read the book, get my information and move on. There are however books that are part of a series, such as Harry Potter, that I will read by the same author, and will continue reading until the series ends. This is because I really want to get my little tidbit of information that was broken up into several books because it was thousands of pages long.
So no, don't declare your blog a waste of time after your hits drop off when your page is excommunicated from the front page of Digg. It just means that your tidbit of information isn't worth reading over and over again, and that your writing isn't especially extraordinary. Digg users read tons and tons of blogs posts and news articles a day. If your blog was so good that it could get them to subscribe, you would already have three book deals.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I give birth to infer from a only one of the articles on your website at this very moment, and I unqualifiedly like your line of blogging. I added it to my favorites trap page file and will be checking assist soon. Divert check out of order my put as well and leave to me conscious what you think. Thanks.