Social Distribution and Traffic Generation

I wondered the other day - is Social Distribution becoming a source of traffic to rival SEM? Is the power of the Stream something that will change the paradigm when it comes to getting people to your site?

Some entirely non-scientific data to support this theory...

I checked my blogs. Here is what I found...

Traffic to the sites in the last week was:
23% direct sourced
35% referred traffic
42% search sourced traffic

Traffic to the sites in that same week in 2008 was:
35% direct sourced
16% referred traffic
49% search sourced traffic

In 2009 the top referring sites were (in order):
Facebook
Twitter
Blogger
Tumblr

In 2008 the top referring sites were (in order):
Digg
mail.google.com
LinkedIn
del.icio.us


Two things to note....

1 - It looks like the majority of traffic is being taken away from Direct traffic. I'm guessing a lot of this is email clients to be honest. In other words, instead of emailing links to each other - we're sharing them using Twitter, Facebook, etc.

2 - This does at least indicate that it is a valid theory that Social Distribution is a legitimate focus area for Traffic Generation for websites.

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