Last week I came across the blog post ‘Do You ‘Like’ My New Fan Page? – What Does it Mean?’ by Gavin Mountford about the change Facebook made to its Fan page. Gavin describes how Facebook changed Fan pages into Like pages . Gavin reports that Facebook feels that becoming a fan is a heavy commitment and not always appropriate, whereas giving it a thumbs up would be more comfortable for people. As a result more participation on the pages is expected.
I am wondering if this is the real reason behind Facebook’s change. I suspect the real reason is a little different. You see, when I looked up the latest StatCounter data on social media, I discovered something that was really surprising to me. No, Facebook was not the surprise. They continue to reign as the number one source of traffic to global websites with almost half (48%) of all Social Media hits.
The surprise is who is in second place. Let’s be honest, if I had asked you this question, I have no doubt that you would have said Twitter. So would I. And if I told you it was not Twitter, I am sure you would have said YouTube or maybe LinkedIn. But none of these answers is correct. The second place, with 25% of Social Media hits to websites, is StumbleUpon.
StumbleUpon is a true social bookmarking site. They index sites based on user input, not by crawling the web. If you look at the graph that StatCounter produced, it becomes even more surprising. Facebook is loosing share rapidly, whereas StumbleUpon is gaining territory.
Furthermore, behind Facebook(48%), StumbleUpon (25%), and Twitter (10%) are YouTube (6%), Reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%). Social bookmarking sites are responsible for over 31% of the hits to global websites, and the number is growing!
Based on these stats, I am not at all surprised with Facebook’s adjustment. I am convinced that, by adapting a semi social bookmarking style, they are hoping to gain some of their momentum back. We will see how their gamble pans out.
Not only Facebook should learn from these stats. We should too. With StumbleUpon being on the move, it seems like a good thing for all of us, to jump on the bandwagon before it is too late. If you have not already done so, sign up for a StumbleUpon account and start bookmarking. You may even want to consider working towards ‘top Stumbler’ status.
As you can see, I have already adjusted my approach. I added the StumbleUpon logo to the upper right corner of every article I post to my blog. I invite you to join StumbleUpon also, and to vote for this post to get you started.
