  Scholarly articles are discussed and shared on social media, which generates
altmetrics. On the opposite side, what is the impact of social media on the
dissemination of scholarly articles and how to measure it? What are the
visiting patterns? Investigating these issues, the purpose of this study is to
seek a solution to fill the research gap, specifically, to explore the dynamic
visiting patterns directed by social media, and examine the effects of social
buzz on the article visits. Using the unique real referral data of 110
scholarly articles, which are daily updated in a 90-day period, this paper
proposes a novel method to make analysis. We find that visits from social media
are fast to accumulate but decay rapidly. Twitter and Facebook are the two most
important social referrals that directing people to scholarly articles, the two
are about the same and account for over 95% of the total social referral
directed visits. There is synchronism between tweets and tweets resulted
visits. Social media and open access are playing important roles in
disseminating scholarly articles and promoting public understanding science,
which are confirmed quantitatively for the first time with real data in this
study.
