From a question posted over at the popular The Admin Zone forum, a number of admins of forums are debating the value of traffic from social networking websites like facebook and twitter.  I decided to run some stats on our 80,000+ forums and see just what type of traffic the major social networks bring, and how likely would a visitor be to explore a forum, or bounce and leave the site.

Below is a chart of visitor activity to Lefora.com forums from popular social networks.

A few interesting stats:

• 1/3 of all our traffic comes from search engines, mostly google.  This traffic tends to be slightly lower performing then our site averages, and something we’re working on improving.
• Facebook is the 5th most popular referrer to our forums (of any website), it is over 5x as popular as myspace for referring traffic.  However, there are two reasons for this.  1, we offer Facebook Connect integration to make it easy to post updates to your facebook wall from the forum, and 2, myspace blocks all outbound links on their site with a scary intermediate page warning people they are leaving the myspace garden.
• Social networking sites generally far out perform the average activity on our site, from pages per visit, time on site, and most importantly, a lower bounce rate (meaning people find what’s interesting in the forums after they click through a link on a social network.

For more Lefora Stats, be sure to check our recently added real-time Stats page.

Photo Credit: flickr.com/photos/superzelle/3490611685

With over 65,000 forums hosted on Lefora, we can run a number of ‘behavioral’ stats on activity within a forum.  One random, but interesting stat, is just how much attention is given to different actions on a forum.  This is based on a percentage of pageviews, so it’s not an accurate reflection of time within each – but it’s a good indicator.

49% of pageviews are spent reading & replying to threads
30% browsing through categories
5% on the headlines page
4% at a login screens
2% reading PMs
2% in the admin panel (admins are the minority here, so this is a significant number)
1% starting topics
0.5% in the user’s dashboard and profile editor
and 6.5% of pageviews are spent doing something else…

Last night, with a full gas tank, Lefora rolled passed the 200,000 member mark (now at 48,640 total forums), we still have a few months to go until our first birthday, so we’re all pretty excited over here.

Lefora ‘by the numbers’ for January:

• 575,904 People
• 8,682,123 Pageviews
• 6.61 Average Pageviews / visit
• 6:08 Avg. Time on Site
• 27% of visitors came from a keyword search (mostly google of course)
• 59% of visitors returned to the site, a third of our visitors returned 10 or more times!

.

We were also recently reviewed at forum-software.org, a popular forum comparison website, we’re the first ‘hosted’ forum solution they’ve reviewed – they had to create a new category on their site just for us.

Paul realized this number – that’s how much activity we’re seeing on lefora right now.  Andrew took it a step farther:

370,333 words typed into posts in the last 24 hours, thats 257 words
per minute, which is approximately 3 reasonably skilled typists typing
into lefora non-stop all day.

Andrew, with his degree in Physics, is always turning out cool visualizations, from lefora stats, to our Leforasaurus 404 mascot.

This weekend, he put together an interesting stat on posting activity for the first week of September (based on the San Francisco PST time zone). The dark squares in the center are topics, and the light gray squares are the posts (this chart shows a healthy ratio). We see that our heaving posting times tend to be midday/afternoon – with not as many people posting at 1am

What’s appears to be a little too subtle hear is the ‘wave’ affect that we see on visits and page views to our site. Each week, our stats have a wave-like cycle, with Friday/Saturday being our lowest activity, and Tue/Wed being our highest level of activity.

Click for full size.