01-03-2011 @ 15:50

Over the last 12 months, things have been moving really quickly at AllAboutCareers and our first site AllAboutLaw has taken hold in the legal sector (something we hope to repeat in the other 23 sectors that we have now expanded to). However, the way in which people have been reaching our site has revealed some interesting statistics.

It’s been interesting to see how traffic to the site has altered; both in terms of numbers and traffic sources. This time last year, most of traffic came from Google, followed by direct traffic and then emails and social media came way down the list. However, more recently, we have been seeing something interesting happening with the traffic coming from social media.

We think that social media and interaction with the content is a really important part of the way that the current generation of students uses websites (as you will see on AllAboutCareers.com) and this year we have been experimenting with social media in a range of different ways to drive traffic and build a community around AllAboutLaw.

The results have been better than we anticipated; with an increase of more than 1000% in the amount of traffic brought to the site per month from Facebook and over 600% from Twitter. This month, AllAboutLaw has reached over 30,000 unique users which, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, is easily over half of all full-time undergraduate law students (c. 56,000).

We plan on putting the research and data we have captured over the last 12 months into action with AllAboutCareers.com and our future projects. You can see our Facebook fan page which has more than 4,700 fans (our overall community of groups now reaches more than 13,000 people). We looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen with our new site and some of the new research we have undertaken in this area.

Another area where we have seen a marked increase in site users is via mobile browsing, in particular from iPhones, which accounted for over 1,000 unique users this month.

Also, as a side point, why are so many people still using Internet Explorer? Luckily, the number of people using it has reduced from almost 50% to just over 30%. If you are one of the people or firms that still (somehow?!?!) has Internet Explorer 6, I would advise you get an upgrade and a new I.T. guy.