Facebook Sees 1000% Jump in LinkedIn Referral Traffic After Twitter Dumps LinkedIn

Corey Wainwright
Corey Wainwright

Updated:

Published:

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You may remember that about two months ago, Twitter and LinkedIn announced they were parting ways. What their breakup meant was an end to the ability for marketers to sync updates from the two sites -- so no longer do you see tweets from your company's Twitter stream showing up on LinkedIn. And even if you weren't syncing every tweet, some marketers were taking advantage of the LinkedIn hashtag function that automatically pulled in tweets with the hashtag #li or #in. That is, until Twitter and LinkedIn called it quits.

As a result, you've probably since gotten used to logging in to LinkedIn to repost a Twitter update that you want to appear to your professional network on LinkedIn, and/or you've started to select the little Twitter icon that you see on LinkedIn that lets you automatically share your LinkedIn updates on Twitter.

Or have you?

Some new data released by PageLever and reported by Mashable reveals that marketers may not be taking that extra step, as referral traffic to Twitter from LinkedIn has dropped significantly since the June 29th announcement ... while referral traffic to Facebook from LinkedIn has skyrocketed. In fact, Facebook received 1000% more page referrals from LinkedIn in July -- the month after the syncing ceased. Take a look:

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Wowza. Even more impressive? With that post-breakup burst, LinkedIn is now surpassing Google and Bing combined as a source of referral traffic to Facebook Pages.

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What This Means for Marketers

We already knew LinkedIn was a powerful tool -- back in January, we reported that it was 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. But for marketers that are interested in improving their Facebook presence, it just became an even more powerful tool. If you have a strong LinkedIn network, it looks like the opportunities for cross-platform promotion are ripe.

But really, it's not just Facebook you can grow from your LinkedIn presence. The reason that spike in referral traffic occurred isn't because LinkedIn users are somehow more interested in Facebook updates than those on any other social network -- it's just that the decrease in Twitter content has caused a (wait for it) decrease in Twitter referral traffic. Because it's just ... not as easy to post Twitter content as it used to be. So people stop. No surprise there.

That means if you start publishing more content to LinkedIn -- regardless of where that content resides -- it will get more visibility amid the now far less competitive LinkedIn feed. Want more blog traffic from LinkedIn? Post more blog content on LinkedIn. Want more LinkedIn followers to convert on your landing pages? Post more landing pages on LinkedIn. Want more of your LinkedIn followers to be Twitter followers? Post more Twitter content on LinkedIn. It's a lot easier to get your content to stand out in the LinkedIn crowd, now that a lot of the riff raff has been cleaned out.

Have you seen referral traffic from LinkedIn to Facebook spike in the past two months?

Image credit: Grim Santo

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