Since the beginning of this year I’ve been carefully watching the web stats for missionfrontiers.org. I’ve watched for trends, peaks, and any kind of cause and effect relationships. There area few tools I use for this, Google Analytics is of course the primary one. However another that has been very valuable and interesting is AddThis.

AddThis is a third party service that puts buttons on your site that allow users to easily share your content. You’ve seen it thousands of times. Just about every website has these tools. There are other services such as ShareThis (which I tried and was not at all impressed with). Twitter and Facebook also provide their own buttons. However I wanted a service that provides a wide range of social sharing options and has detailed meaningful web stats. AddThis has all that.

It is a free service, and with any free service the following applies: “if it is free, YOU are the product”. Any website can collect information about you when you visit: your web browser, computer operating system, screen size, where you are (general location based on your IP address), what page you came from, and other very general information. They don’t install tracking software on your computer, nor do they collect any personally identifying information. They then agregate this information and apply some magic stastistical analysis and are able to provide information that helps other companies advertise their products better. Sound too Big Brother for you? You can opt out.

Thats not what I use it for, but mentioned it for the sake of full disclosure. They do get something out of providing the service. None of the personal information people enter onto the site (ie member’s account information) is accessible. Just the standard web browsing stats your browser tells every website.

OK, so back to my story.

I mentioned I started with another service, ShareThis, but never was happy with it. They kept promising to get things right, but it kept not working. So around April I switched to AddThis. So the data I have is not since the new site went live.

This is the graph of all the sharing data to date. You’ll notice we are not exactly a social media powerhouse. There has been some sharing, but not much. However there are a couple of points that should not be overlooked.

If you look at the graph (orange is shares, blue is clicks), there is one obvious spike in the data. That was on May 2. Can anyone remember what the big story was May 2? Osama bin Laden had been killed the day before and news had gone out that night. Monday May 2 everyone was talking about it. What in the world does that have to do with a missions publication? March 2010 they had done an issue titled “Loving bin Laden”. Rick Wood, the editor, says this about the issue:

When I say the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” what thoughts or images come to your mind? Do you think of bloody pictures of terrorist attacks from Israel or New York? Do you think of masked gunmen with AK-47s raised in the air and explosives strapped to their chests? Perhaps fear or anger rises in your heart. If so, you are not alone. I think all of us, to a greater or lesser degree, have had these images pressed into our minds by television images from around the world. When I have spoken with people in churches about reaching Muslims with the gospel, the one thing that I have encountered most often is fear. Believers are often afraid for their personal safety when thinking of making contact with Muslims, even those in the USA. But how does God want us to respond? It might be natural for us to be fearful, but we are called to supernatural living. And fear is not part of supernatural living. We are called to faith as we proclaim God’s glory in every tribe and tongue, including among Muslims.

Some readers had already shared this issue and the main article, and we shared it via the Mission Frontiers Facebook and Twitter accounts. It got quite a bit of attention and sharing as you can see. The lead article “Loving bin Laden” was shared 38 times and received 215 clicks (viral lift of 556%). The main issue (this story and other articles, what we posted to Facebook and Twitter) was shared 7 times but received 113 clicks (viral lift of 1614%!!). Clearly it got people’s attention and they wanted to tell others.

Now clicks are not our goal. They are a good indicator that people are interested, but are they engaged? Along comes Google Analytics. I can go to the data for that article and one stat leaps off the page. Average time spent on the page: 9 minutes and 14 seconds. In internet time that is HUGE. Facebook users (not included in the AddThis data) spent 25 minutes on the page. Clearly people were not only going to the page, but were reading the article.

When there is quality content on a trending topic, the effects of social sharing can be huge.

The other point on the chart I want to point out is labeled “2”. This one is not nearly as dramatic, but does have a different kind of significance. You’ll notice that the clicks (51) were pretty high, however the shares are very low (3). This is because we had one share that generated 45 clicks. The author of an article tweeted (shared on Twitter) a link to his article, and one of his followers retweeted (forwarded it to their followers) it. These two shares resulted in a viral index of 2250% for that page. I did some checking and the author who originally tweeted it has over 3,000 followers. Our typical Twitter shares are by those with a few dozen.

What is the takeaway from this example? Influencers!! To get a lot of new eyes on your ‘product’ you need to get influencers engaged. These are the people with many followers who are actively engaged in what the person says. I follow certain ‘influencers’ on Twitter. People or organizations who are leaders in the web design and development industry. I want to know what trends and tips they are aware of.

The same is true for missions. It is our goal to get Mission Frontiers and the U.S. Center for World Mission to be recognized as a “thought leader”. One where people “follow” on Twitter or “like” on Facebook. One that other leaders in the movement will follow and share our content. We are actively working towards this goal. It is not about chasing numbers, I want to make that perfectly clear. Rather it is about using tools available to us to effect the most people we possibly can.

It is true that the numbers are still pretty small when looked at objectively. However the trends are very promising and do scale. I’ve learned quite a bit about how people use the site and how valuable sharing tools are. These will be very important tools as we continue to promote the website, and the learnings of the past few weeks are already paying dividends in getting new people to the site.