Facebook Is A Nice Traffic Hose, But It's Much Better To Get Direct Traffic

In media and publishing, social has been all the rage since BuzzFeed burst on the scene.

BuzzFeed made its name by saying it didn't care about its home page. It treated Facebook as its home page, and grabbed traffic through the Newsfeed.

Since BuzzFeed became the it brand in media, lots of other people have tried to target Facebook for traffic. And that's smart, since Facebook is a firehose of traffic.

But, if you really want loyal, engaged users, you need to make your site a destination, according to Pew Research. The people that come directly to your site end up spending more than twice as much time on your site as those that come from Facebook.

So, it's good to get lots of people from Facebook, but it's even better to have people coming directly to your site. Or as Fred Wilson once put it when talking about platforms: It's always best to be your own b**ch.

Here's a chart showing that from our pals at Statista.