Data Doesn’t Lie: Ranking the Top 20 Social Media & Internet Marketing Blogs

As the calendar changed from 2010 to 2011, there have been many year-end blog posts asking people for their opinions on the best social media blogs out there. And that’s fine, because those posts are often a good way to discover new blogs that you might not have been aware of.

But what’s sometimes missing from those discussions is data. So the folks at Cision set about to rank the best social media and internet marketing blogs based on actual data. What they found is interesting.

Methodology

Pulling from over 400 social media and internet marketing blogs in Cision’s media database, they then ranked them using their data and Compete data, by:

  • Who gets the most traffic? (average unique visitors per month),
  • On which sites do users discover other interesting content? (average page views per month per unique visitor),
  • Which sites keep visitors the longest? (average time on site per month per unique visitor), and
  • Which sites keep visitors coming back for more? (average visits per month per unique visitor).

When you rank sites this way, you get a ranking based on each site’s actual performance.

Top 20 Social Media Blogs

So when you do this, what’s the ranking of the top 20 social media and internet marketing blogs? Not surprisingly, Mashable comes out number one (deservedly so). But the rest are interesting.

  1. Mashable
  2. Ignite Social Media
  3. Problogger
  4. Read Write Web
  5. Media Shift
  6. Danny Brown
  7. aimClear Blog
  8. Seth Godin’s Blog
  9. Social Media Today
  10. Social Business
  11. Ogilvy PR 360 Digital Influence Blog
  12. HubSpot Internet Marketing Blog
  13. Inside Facebook
  14. ChrisBrogan.com
  15. Small Business Search Marketing
  16. digiday:DAILY
  17. Dealer Refresh
  18. Threeminds
  19. MackCollier.com
  20. Daily Blog Tips

Conclusions

Some of the names on this list are expected, but others are interesting surprises. And the order is surprising to me, as are the fact that many popular blogs didn’t make the list because they don’t perform as well as these, at least according to this particular set of data points. We were, of course, pleased to have the Ignite Social Media blog ranked 2nd only to Mashable (we don’t expect to depose them any time soon), particularly since the blog is secondary to our main business as a social media agency. If you’d like to read the other 80 blogs on the list, read the complete ranking.

Any surprises to you? Do you know of any other lists like this that rank social media blogs through data?



Ignite Social Media