The following video shows a direct connection between social posts and site traffic. Even news items that would not qualify as big or breaking news draw eyeballs. In this case, And the West is History and a photo gallery several days old rise in the rankings due to social referrals. A new story about lightning risk gets more attention.
Notice the story rankings in the upper right, but also the number of people on site in the upper left. After posts, it climbs from a resting point in the low seventies to upper sixties and climbs to around 90 active users.
And while even older items of less impact have short term website benefit, newly posted stories of high interest can continue to draw traffic all afternoon and evening.
The video test started around 2:30 p.m. and lasted about 45 minutes. At 3:42, a story about the Sheriff’s new armored car posted and Vanessa got it out on social media.
As you can see from the trending report below, this test and the the armored car posts brought traffic well above the previous week.
Between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., traffic ranges from 17% to 39% increase.

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Watch video at full screen to see story ranking.