Day in and day out, you’re working hard to build your returning and loyal audience. You’re publishing tons of high-quality content. You know it’s great content because your visitors are spending lots of time engaging with it, and they’re coming back for more of it. The question I have for you is this: Are you making your best referrers work hard for you? Are you leveraging the best social channels to get your best content in front of the best audience?

To answer that question, let’s talk about your traffic sources, sorted by conversion quality.

If you’re a Chartbeat Publishing user, you probably already know that the right-hand side of the dashboard gives you the real-time low-down on how many concurrent visitors are coming to your website, and also which traffic sources are responsible for driving that traffic. What you might not know is that you can go even one step further: When you use that little drop-down menu in the top-right corner and filter by “conversion quality”—boom! Game changer.

Now all your referrers are instantly sorted not by the number of concurrent visitors they’re delivering to your site, but by the percentage of visitors who have returned to your site after being referred a first time.

Now let’s talk specifics: Facebook and Twitter. See how Facebook is driving almost 4x the number of concurrents, but Twitter’s conversion rate is 14% higher? This should get you thinking about which channels matter more to building audience loyalty.

It stands to reason that because people who come from Twitter are more likely to return, if you can get a lot more traffic from that referrer, you’re going to be more effective in expanding your segment of returning visitors.

So how do we make that happen? Now that you know visitors from Twitter are more likely to return, you can focus more of your time and attention on that social network, and you can get more of your most engaging content in front of that audience. Sort your Top Pages by Engaged Time, and look out for articles with retaining badges—these are the highly engaging stories that are ripe for the tweeting.

How about for ol’ Facebook? It’s still doing a great job at getting people in the door, so let’s make sure they stick around. Pivot on Facebook, see where those big numbers of people are spending time engaging, and make sure those pages have great links for recirculating. Bonus tip: Since you know what kind of content brought them to your website, you can hold their attention by connecting them to similar articles. Clever, huh?

There you have it—quantity meets quality. Building that loyal audience one real-time decision after another.