Many sites with a metered paywall have been able to drive traffic through social media. (Poynter recently reported on the different ways six major papers were combining social media and paywalls.) But there’s been some speculation about Facebook’s social readers, which allow users to automatically share their reading and viewing activity with friends, with some rumors that they are “collapsing.”
The chart below, compiled and created by Inside Facebook, shows Monthly Active Users for a number of news sites. However, one should note that there are many things affecting social reader usage, from Facebook’s continually changing algorithm, which alters when and how user activity on another site is shared, to coding bugs within one publication’s social reader.
© Inside Facebook
Clearly, social readers can be a great way to get referral traffic to your site, especially if you have a metered (not hard) paywall that lets new visitors sample your content. But be aware that user experience is a big determinant of how much referral traffic you’ll get. Many consumers dislike social reader applications that require referred users to authorize the app and share their activity in order to read an article read and shared by their friend.
Smart subscription sites know that social readers are traffic drivers, not conversion mechanisms. They’re also wary of Facebook, which essentially controls your content’s distribution through its social reader and has a penchant for changing terms of use on the fly.
This is a great option, since it lets people share your content over multiple platforms as well as reduces visitor resistance to sharing by not forcing them to link one of their social media accounts to your site. Bravo, HuffPo!
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