With all the work we put into our online presence, our success all comes down to engagement and ensuring users “stick” around on our websites and social media pages long enough to convert into customers. For an optometry site, the customer conversion may include visitors booking an appointment, ordering contacts or sending in a contact form. Many site owners try to increase user enjoyment, engagement and time spent on site by focusing on social efforts such as creating shareable content (such as blogs or videos), adding a comments section and forums or adding “like”, “+1” or share buttons to their sites.
A recent article from TechCrunch entitled Want More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site suggests that the best way to get users to spend time on your site, might be coming from the other direction. The article discusses a study that was recently done by Gigya (a company which integrates online businesses with social networks) showing that users that log in to a site through a social network such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ spend 50% more time on the site and view twice the amount of pages. Out of those social logins, Facebook by far held the majority with 61%, followed by Yahoo, Twitter, Google and then LinkedIn.
This means that when a user that finds some interesting content on your Facebook page for example, finds a link to your website, he is more likely to spend more time there once he arrives, implying that leads from social media might be more effective than those from traditional search engine search (Gigya’s data included the Web, mobile web, and apps).
The bottom line? If you want people to spend more time on your website, it’s a good idea to have a social media presence for your practice which is linked to your site. Then you are likely to get more visits and more “stickiness” which will ultimately lead to more business.
