StumbleUpon: More Compelling Statistics

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a blog entry about StumbleUpon – what it is (social bookmarking tool), what it does (drives website traffic), and why you should probably know about it (the tool doubled its user base to 20 million in less than two years).

StumbleUpon recently worked with a data visualization/visual content creation agency, Column Five Media, to produce this awesome infographic that offers even more compelling statistics to solidify StumbleUpon’s influence.

Titled “The Life Cycle of a Web Page on StumbleUpon,” the infographic offers some very interesting data – provided by StumbleUpon – regarding the “stickiness” of the websites visited through their services. Some of it was previously discussed in my earlier blog post, such as the claim that StumbleUpon is the top social media referrer, beating out Facebook by approximately 13% and Twitter by approximately 47%.

What was really interesting to me was the half-life (which is defined by Merriam Webster as “a period of usefulness or popularity preceding decline or obsolescence”) of links shared through StumbleUpon versus Facebook or Twitter. The infographic shows the half-life of a page shared through StumbleUpon as 400 hours – about 16.5 days! That’s a wildly superior half-life compared to the statistics from Twitter and Facebook: links shared through Twitter have a half-life of merely 2.8 hours and Facebook is only slightly better with 3.2 hours. What’s this mean? Overall, I think this data suggests that StumbleUpon is better at keeping links and web pages relevant for longer.

Devious Media also blogged about the infographic and pointed out that StumbleUpon’s “algorithm is exceptionally good at finding things [that users will] like.” Furthermore, they note that, unlike Twitter and Facebook, where messages & links get lost in the constant news feed updates, StumbleUpon will point users to links that may be interesting – no matter how old that link may be.

In today’s world, we’re all fighting for relevancy and attention for our messages. With nearly 300,000 status updates being posted on Facebook every minute (I’m sure that number is growing every day), and 250 million tweets per day on Twitter (also probably a growing number), having your message, link and web page live for longer than a few hours can be a pretty big deal. Maybe it’s worth it to even get yourself a StumbleUpon account just to check out what all the buzz is about.

Original post on Reach the Public.