As some of you know I am the CEO of Bullying UK and I thought you may find this data useful in helping your decision makers to embrace Social Media more fully as part of your online strategies.

From around April 1st this year Bullying UK fully integrated Social Media into the way we work.

The comparison looks only at Referral Traffic, that is to say websites that include a link that a user clicks and arrives at our site, this doesn't include Google Search and Direct Traffic and covers only the top ten of over 36,000 links coming into bullying.co.uk

So the first thing you will notice is many new Social Media sites in the last 6 months compared to the same time period a year ago. Stumble Upon, Twitter.com, UnHub.com, Twit.ac and Facebook are all new entries in the Bullying UK top 10

Who are these Social Media Sites

• StumbleUpon is a Social Bookmarking service that has become very popular via our AddThis Widget and has driven huge amounts of traffic through its recommendation engine.
• Twitter.com represents links clicked from the Twitter.com websites it does NOT include traffic from clients like Tweetdeck or Tweetie those are counted as Direct Traffic
• Unhub is the Social Tool Bar we link from our Twitter.com profile (very handy to separate this data our from your other click through)
• Twit.ac is our Automated Twitter to RSS feed provider again always useful to separate click data out from the source where you can.
• Facebook this represents Click through from our Facebook Fan page but also "organic" click through when people have shared pages into Facebook from our site and a friend has clicked to visit us

What I hope the above numbers show you is that rather than cannibalising your visitor traffic Social Media can bring in a huge magnitude more readers to your site, some of those readers will in turn share what they are reading with others creating a circle of free promotion.

You should embed the Addthis widget into every page of your site to help people share your content far and wide the more visible the Addthis Widget is the more users will use it, In my testing I have found that the top of the page as close to the page title as possible works best.

I wasn't sure where to put this but thought it was worth a mention:

You will also notice that the sites listed in 08 that are still in the Top 10 in 09 have changed very little from a traffic perspective with the exception being Childline.org.uk that has seen it's visitor click through fall since it's redesign. I think I spotted the problem and have let them know, the site only responds to www.childline.org.uk if you type childline.org.uk you get an error.

Any external sites not linking using www. is sending visitors into an error so they never get to the Childline website now the knock on effect is a small dip in visitors to Bullying UK but it might be bigger overall on Childlines stats.

Most people use www. when they link or visit a website however it is still important to make sure http://yourwebsite.com forwards onto www.yourwebsite.com so you don't loose visitors some people simply don't use www. partly its due to WWW being a hold over of the Internet decades ago (Anyone remember gopher://? ) and also because the 4 extra characters take up space when your creating Social Media messages for Twitter and Facebook.

It's important to check if you have changed servers or redeveloped your website as this is the most likely time for this problem to creep in.

Check yours now and see it's a fairly quick fix and there is more than one way to solve it depending on how your website and servers are setup.