Fun Survey on Social Sites & Blogging – the results

Recently I came across a fairly awful article which advised people to social bookmark their own blog posts in order to achieve better SEO results and dominate search results pages by having various social sites rank for rather spurious long tail search terms.

The article advised setting up 10 email addresses and then joining each social site 10 times and bookmarking your blog posts 10 times on each site over a period of a couple of weeks.

Apart from being rather underhand and dubious morally, who the hell as the time for such tactics?

However it did get me thinking about whether people did have strategies when it came to promoting their blog posts, and so I put together a little survey, which I them promoted on Twitter.

A big thank you to the 100 people who took part, and apologies for the delay in writing up my findings!

First of all, let me be the first to admit that this is for fun, and not at all scientific. The results are interesting, but not in any way conclusive. Bear in mind that the small pool of participants are all pretty much entirely made up of Twitter users, and therefore are a certain type of computer user to begin with. For one thing, we can assume they are positively predisposed to Twitter as a social site! :)

Overview – what I learned

As well as the obvious caveats above, I realise now that I possibly should have aimed this survey at business bloggers, as several of the questions make much more sense to a business blogger than to a personal blogger. As it turned out, of the 69 people who answered about what kind of blog they had, 41 had personal or hobby blogs – that’s 59.4%.

Interesting that so few people bookmark their own blog posts – 86 out of 99 people (86.9%) questioned don’t bookmark their own blog posts, and therefore neither do they have a strategy for same. The only strategy for bookmarking ones own blogposts seemed to be using ‘Share This’ type buttons and plugins on the blog posts themselves, which allows your visitors to bookmark them for you.

On the other hand 46 out of 91 people (50.5%) questioned bookmark other people’s blog posts, which would certainly make it seem worthwhile to include that ‘Share This’ button on your posts. to make it easier for them!

Only 34 out of 76 people (44.7%) questioned broadcast their own blog posts on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, another number I expected to be higher. For those who DO broadcast their own blog posts Twitter came out top of the heap for broadcasting one’s own blog posts, followed by Facebook.

Twitter and Facebook cropped up together several times as being the most popular sites, interestingly, Twitter and Facebook were the two sites thought to bring most traffic to people’s blogs, but Facebook disappeared from the picture when people were asked what sites brought the most valuable traffic – Twitter remained at the top.

When asked whether time spent on social sites had brought value to their blogs, 31 out of 65 people (47.7%) answered Yes. This was still higher than those who felt it had not brought value to their blogs (43.5%) but I was surprised it wasn’t a higher number.

In any case, the actual results are below, hopefully you will find some other interesting info in there. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to partake!

Question 1: Do you social bookmark your own blog posts? (by social bookmark I mean Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Shared Google Bookmarks etc)

Yes – 13.1%
No – 86.9%
99 people answered this question.

Well that’s probably the most interesting result right there. From time to time I do bookmark my own posts, usually as a result of thinking that i must be the only one who doesn’t, but it appears I am not alone!

Question 2: How many sites do you social bookmark your own blog posts on?

1 – 7.9%
2-5 – 5.6%
6-10 – 2.2%
over 10 – 0.0%
as many as possible – 1.1%
none – 83.1%
89 people answered this question

Obviously, since a high percentage of people said they don’t bookmark their own posts it stands to reason that this question would only be relevant to a small portion of the participants.

Question 3: Do you social bookmark other people’s blog posts?

Yes – 50.5%
No – 49.5%
91 people answered this question

It seems a much higher percentage bookmark others blog posts than their own.

Question 4: Do you use any tools to submit your blog posts to social sites?

Yes – 17.3%
No – 82.7%
81 people answered this question

See the graph below for some of the tools mentioned by the few that do use tools, as you can see Del.icio.us seems popular, particularly the FireFox extension.

Question 5: Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking your own sites?

Yes – 3.8%
No – 96.3%
80 people answered this question.

The following comments were also left on this question, two pointing out they use those ’share’ buttons to allow other people to easily bookmark their posts, and two more tongue in cheek comments :)

• I use “share This” to let others bookmark the post they like
• I include a ’share’ button with links to digg, delicious, email, etc.
• Wish I had now after answering these questions!
• Christ no.

Question 6: Do you broadcast your blog posts on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc?

Yes – 44.7%
No – 55.3%
76 people answered this question.

The following were left as to what social media sites they used to broadcast blog posts:

Twitter obviously turns up a lot, which is to be expected really given that these are nearly all Twitter users, but it’s interesting that Facebook is clearly popular for broadcasting blog posts too.

Question 7: Is your blog of a business or personal/hobby nature?

Business – 15.9%
Personal /Hobby – 59.4%
Other – 24.6%
69 people answered this question

Of those that answered other, most did so because their blog is a mix of business and personal.
I expected more of the responses to be business related to be honest. Even if we add Business and Other we get 40.5% – less than half.

I wonder if the responses to this survey would have been significantly different if I had specified this was for business blogs only?

Question 8: What social site do you feel brings you the most traffic, and what social site do you think brings you the most *valuable* traffic?

41 people answered this question

The responses to this question are below. Only 41 people answered, does this mean a lot of people are not interested or paying attention to their traffic? As a lot of participants were talking about personal sites rather than business sites this is possible.

Question 9: Do you feel your time spent on social sites to date has brought value to your blog?

Yes – 47.7%
No – 41.5%
Other – 10.8%
65 people answered this question

Of the people who answered ‘Other’ most were unsure of whether the time spent had brought value to their blog, though one individual answered:
“I don’t like ’social sites’ as they are collecting information for US intelligence agencies.”

Question 10: Without considering value, or traffic, or anything like that, what’s your *favourite* social site, and (very briefly) why?

48 people answered this question

You can read through all the responses below, but you can see from the graph that Twitter is by far an away the favourite – however as mentioned the participants were all garnered from Twitter so that’s not a huge surprise!

Facebook once again features heavily which is interesting, and StumbleUpon doesn’t do too badly either.

• delicious
• Delicious – because i think people use delicious to bookmark websites/blog posts/etc that they personally find interesting or useful. Digg and Reddit – are more about what people think other people might find interesting so they can gain points/karma.
• delicious – clean simple and integrates nicely with firefox
• delicious – easy to add to. digg. good way to fnd new good websites/stories.
• digg – really great thing to check in on at intervals during the day during a break for a quick fix of something to have a look at.
• Facebook – as it is feature rich. MySpace because that is where my customers are.
• Facebook – as it’s the only one I post on at the moment
• Facebook – Best of a bad bunch. Most people are on it.
• Facebook – greater reach
• Facebook – Keep in touch with friends, people travelling, view and share photos. Its highly addictive!
• Facebook – Was facebook, purely because so many people I know are on it (and bugged me to join). So I joined. But I don’t like it that much. It’s spam with a login. But it helps keep up with what everyone’s up to because we’ve lost the art of smalltalk and the conversation that goes nowhere
• FACEBOOK. LESS STUPID THAN MYSPACE. TYPING IN CAPS MAKES THIS MORE LEGITIMATE. :<
• friendfeed, as i can merge all sources of info to one
• Google Reader – I don’t know if this fits the question but Google Reader is my preferred social site at the moment, allowing me to catch up on blogs and comment.
• Jaiku – because of accessibility
• none
• none
• Plurk – it’s where me and my real friends hang out.
• rune scape – because u can kill and talk to people
• skimbit.com – its just a great tool for research and love the way its visual too
• Stumbleupon – Because Digg has waaay too much bullshit associated with it. I don’t really use any soc-nets for promotion though.
• stumbleupon – because it gives random sites.
• stumbleupon – i don’t have to socialize
• stumbleupon – it owns.
• stumbleupon – it’s fun.
• StumbleUpon – keeps me entertained when bored!
• They all make my teeth ache. No time for all that.
• Twitter
• Twitter – because it’s often the first way I hear about things and I would not have heard about some of those things (or come across some interesting people) without Twitter
• Twitter – because it’s real people you interact with about everything
• Twitter – brevity
• Twitter – Currently Twitter because it’s simple and clean and I have it set up. The fact that it was easy to implement and attracted the kind of people I wanted to attract and doesn’t require the kind of frontage Facebook does for example made it most attractive to me
• Twitter – for conversation and raising local profile
• Twitter – friends – place we interact
• Twitter – good fun – not to be take seriously for me
• Twitter – Haven’t figured out why I like it yet. I think the word limit makes it unique.
• Twitter – I easily spend the most time on Twitter and find it most entertaining and useful for work
• Twitter – I’m relatively new to it, but have found both the social and learning aspects of the site extremely good.
• Twitter – it’s fun, informative, great way to meet people and find new things of interest
• Twitter – it’s lightweight and carries a lot more professionals
• Twitter – It’s where my peers hang out.
• Twitter – Its a human knowledge base.
• Twitter – its random access to people thoughts is interesting
• Twitter – keeps me up to date, relevant, doesn’t get in the way as it stays (mostly) in a Firefox sidebar.
• Twitter – Possibly because I have control issues.
• Twitter by a long stretch. No other social tool comes close to creating the type of online community feel that Twitter does.
• Twitter, because it encourages conversation and creativity with words.
• Twitter. Get to talk to people, like. Make nice new acquaintances.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.