WebProNews

Using Facebook Traffic to Drive Brand Loyalty

WebProNews recently covered a study from Chitika, which found that Facebook was the most valuable social media tool for driving repeat readers to content sites. The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitika's publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site.

New Google Labs: Related Links and Script Converter

Google has released a couple of new Labs projects. The first one is called Script converter, and the second one is called Related Links. The Script Converter Lab lets users read the text of any script in the supported languages, which currently consist of: - Hindi - Bengali - English - Gujarati - Kannada - Malayalam - Marathi - Nepali - Tamil - Telugu All you have to do is enter text or a web address in the box, select the language you want to read it in, and press convert.

Amazon and Walmart Engage in Price War Over Holiday Book Shoppers

Amazon and Walmart have been engaged in an online price war over holiday sales of bargain books. The whole thing began when Walmart announced that it would let customers preorder 10 of the most highly anticipated upcoming books for as little as $10 each. In a matter of hours, Amazon matched the price for all of the same books. Walmart then dropped the price to $9. Then Amazon did the same.

What Twitterers Want: News

Twitter can be a lot of things for a lot of different people. However, according to online ad network Chitika, more of them want news than anything else. Chitika released results from a study of its users, looking at what Twitter users want. Chitika categorized the sites that get the most links from Twitter. Here's how it shakes out by genre according to the ad network:

The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook

There's no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones. However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.

An Equation for Getting More Traffic from Twitter

Back in June, Hubspot shared data, which indicated that about one and a half percent of all tweets were retweets. I'd be surprised if that number hasn't increased in the last few months. More people are adopting Twitter and becoming familiar with the Twitter culture. More tools have come out, which cater to the easy re-tweet. More sites have adopted retweet buttons, such as the one from Tweetmeme. I seriously doubt people are retweeting less.

Photo Inclusion Can Bring in Traffic

Hitwise has released some interesting data regarding photo-searching habits. The concept was conceived of as the firm noticed the popularity of the search "great north run photos". "This made me curious about the popularity of searches for photos related to big events and news stories," says Hitwise's Robin Goad.

Twitter Traffic Slows as Money Increases

You might say Twitter is "in the money." As WebProNews previously reported, Twitter has been raising funds at a $1 billion valuation. Twitter CEO Evan Williams wrote on the Twitter Blog today: There's a lot of talk today about our financing. Yesterday we closed a significant round of funding with a group of investment firms that we're excited to publicly thank: Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley.

Where the Traffic Went in August

comScore Media Metrix released its top 50 web properties list for August this week, and found that educational sites and humor sites were quite popular for the month. Home sites also saw some significant gains.

UK News Sites Getting Big Traffic from US

British news sites are starting to see a lot more traffic from the US. UK Internet visits to News and Media websites grew by 8% last year according to Hitwise, and US Internet visits to UK News and Media sites have gone up by 54%.