Twitter May Convert More Site Visitors to Loyal Readers than Facebook or Google

By Minal Bopaiah New York magazine’s pop culture site Vulture and Chartwell have teamed up to discern what makes a site visitor return to

By Minal Bopaiah

New York magazine’s pop culture site Vulture and Chartwell have teamed up to discern what makes a site visitor return to a site.

While Vulture is not a subscription site, the study is interesting for one main reason — it looked at time on site as a function of initial referral source.

It turns out that visitors who landed on the Vulture site from Twitter were 50% more likely to return than those that landed on the site via Facebook, and 100% more likely to return than those that landed on Vulture via Google.

That means that for a site like Vulture, Twitter could be a better marketing channel for loyal readers (re: prospective subscribers) than Facebook or even SEO.

This is the first time we’ve seen a real value ascribed to social media; usually most subscription site executives tell me that social media is a poor channel for converting site visitors into paying subscribers.

But if social media is a better way of targeting prospective loyal readers — defined as those who visit your site more than once in a month and are also more likely to spend more time on your site — than the value of social media as a marketing channel may have just increased.

Of course, one should be careful not to generalize these results. Twitter does seem to have more journalists (who are more media-engaged than the general population) and more pop culture enthusiasts. So while Twitter may be a better way to target prospective loyal readers for sites like Vulture, other news or information publications may find other social media platforms to be better. For example, cooking sites may have better luck on Facebook or Pinterest.

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