Facebook knows that the social networking site isn’t just about connecting with friends and relatives, but also about staying up-to-date on the world around us. They had this in mind when working with 29 media sites to develop “Stories to Share,” a new feature they hope will increase outbound clicks to media sites.
The tool works by recommending articles not yet shared that have the potential to be most engaging. Since only a small percentage of content to drive the most traffic, Facebook’s assistance in picking out what works best on their network will seek to grow that percentage. The “Stories to Share” tool is accessed through the Insight’s dashboard, but is currently available to a limited number of media pages.
A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that 30 percent of adults in the U.S. consume their news via Facebook. It makes sense that when Facebook develops ways to maximize what media outlets receive from them, Facebook will stand to get more ad clicks, too. Already on top of the social game when it comes to driving traffic than any other network, Facebook has increased referral traffic by 170 percent in the past year alone. Some sites have seen much more than that in referral traffic increases over the past year. Traffic to sites like TIME have increased by 208 percent and Buzzfeed has increased by 855 percent. If all goes according to plan, Facebook is currently on a path to drive three-quarters of all social traffic.
“When, people find Facebook more engaging, people spend more time on Facebook and see more ads, so one of our goals is to get people to use Facebook more. It’s important to make Facebook more engaging first and foremost because it creates a great user experience, but that also help our business,” said Facebook’s head of platform Justin Osofsky in a recent chat with Techcrunch.
In order to develop the tool, Facebook worked alongside a small group of media sites over a seven day period during which Facebook shared best practices and advised media sites to increase the number of posts they put out each day. On average, the sites increased their posts by 57 percent and from which sites saw an increase of outbound clicks by 89 percent. Other Facebook measurements like “Likes” and “Fans” saw double digit increases as well.
Source: Facebook
