Tumblr referrals just got bumped up higher on many brands’ priority lists. The 2014 U.S. Mobile Benchmark Report from Adobe Digital Index was released this month, and Tumblr referrals were found to drive the highest revenue per visit (RPV) from mobile devices.
Driving $2.57 per visit generated to a retail site on tablets and $0.67 on smartphones, Tumblr outpaced Facebook which only drove $1.55 on tablet devices and $0.42 on smartphones. Both Twitter and Pinterest generated less than half the revenue per visit from smartphones as Facebook. However, Twitter outpaced Pinterest on revenue per visit from tablets coming in at just over $1.00 per visit while Pinterest came in at just under $1.00 per visit.
The story on PCs is a bit different. Revenue generated per visit from PCs was highest for Facebook followed by Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr, respectively.
Given the revenue per visit data, it’s important to determine where social networks’ referred traffic comes from. For Pinterest, 64% of referred traffic comes from mobile browsers. For Twitter, 62% of referrals come from tablets and smartphones.
Another interesting finding for brands from the Adobe report relates to content sharing. Today, personalized content sharing through email and text messaging is more than twice as popular than group sharing via social media (70% to 30%). The breakdown from the report shows how significantly things have changed between 2013 and 2014:
- iMessage sharing is up 259% over 2013
- Pinterest sharing is up 131% over 2013
- Email sharing is up 5.2% over 2013
- Facebook sharing is down 42.6% from 2013
- URL link sharing is down 26.8% from 2013
- Twitter sharing is down 22.6% from 2013
For brands, it’s particularly interesting to note the change in Facebook sharing. Given recent changes to Facebook’s algorithm that makes it very difficult for content published on Facebook Pages to appear organically in Facebook fans’ feeds, the drop in user sharing adds one more log to the fire that is causing brands to pull back on their Facebook focus. On the other hand, Pinterest sharing is soaring and Tumblr revenue per visit is higher. Bottom-line, Facebook might be the biggest, but it’s not necessarily the best when it comes to connecting your brand with consumer audiences, particularly mobile audiences.
Have you shifted money or time away from Facebook yet to focus on more niche marketing opportunities? Have you considered doing so? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
You can follow the link at the beginning of this article to access the complete report with all of the details from Adobe.
Image: Josh James licensed CC BY 2.0
Susan Gunelius is the author of 10 marketing, social media, branding, copywriting, and technology books, and she is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She also owns Women on Business, an award-wining blog for business women. She is a featured columnist for Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com, and her marketing-related articles have appeared on websites such as MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, TodayShow.com, and more.
She has over 20 years of experience in the marketing field having spent the first decade of her career directing marketing programs for some of the largest companies in the world, including divisions of AT&T and HSBC. Today, her clients include large and small companies around the world and household brands like Citigroup, Cox Communications, Intuit, and more. Susan is frequently interviewed about marketing and branding by television, radio, print, and online media organizations, and she speaks about these topics at events around the world. You can connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+.
