A recent study from Shareaholic revealed that StumbleUpon was referring more traffic to publishers than a host of other popular social sites (such as YouTube and LinkedIn), combined. Some readers were quick to comment that visitors from StumbleUpon tend to be less engaged and have high bounce rates. Now, a new report from Shareaholic ranking 8 social platforms on their “post-click engagement” confirms those anecdotal accounts, with some other interesting insights to boot.
To arrive at its findings, Shareaholic looked at average activity for a 6-month period (September 2013-February 2014) across its network of more than 200,000 publishers and 250 million unique visitors per month.
The report finds that YouTube refers easily the most engaged visitors, with their average time on site of 228 seconds exceeding the closest competitors, Google+ (188.5) and LinkedIn (133.1) by a considerable amount. While those sites happen to refer the most engaged visitors, they also refer the fewest, per the earlier Shareaholic report.
As for StumbleUpon? Its grand total was 54 seconds, the shortest duration among the 8 sites measured.
Not too surprisingly, the rankings for average pages per visit followed suit to a large extent, with YouTube (2.99), Google+ (2.45) and LinkedIn (2.23) in the lead, and StumbleUpon (1.5) bringing up the rear.
When it came time to crunch the numbers for bounce rates, Shareaholic found YouTube to again be the leader (43.2%), while Reddit (70.2%) and StumbleUpon (67.5%) vied for the title of most fickle.
What about Facebook, which dominates all sites in terms of social traffic? It was middle of the pack on all counts, fairly much on par with Twitter.
One other thing worth remembering? At least as far as news sites go, nothing beats a direct visit.
