Facebook’s referral traffic share grew over 37% in Q1 2014, Pinterest was up 48%, Twitter increased only 1%

Social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic today released a report covering referral traffic data from the eight largest social media sites in Q1 2014. In short, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Google+ all gained, while YouTube and LinkedIn lost.

As with previous reports, however, if we take a closer look at the data, it becomes clear that only the top three are really worth considering. Here’s the breakdown from Shareholic, which tracks 400 million users visiting its network of 300,000 publishers:

The month columns show the “share of visits,” a percentage of overall traffic (direct, social referrals, organic search, paid search, and so on) that sites received, while the change lists how much each social network’s share of visits gained or declined. Shareaholic can pool all this data together as its network is well diversified, with sites ranging from independent lifestyle blogs to publishing companies to commerce sites.

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Facebook’s referral traffic share grew from 15.44 percent to 21.25 percent, Pinterest was up from 4.79 percent to 7.10 percent, while Twitter moved from 1.12 percent to 1.14 percent. In other words, just like in the previous quarter, Facebook and Pinterest showed phenomenal growth given their positions, while Twitter remained essentially flat.

The other five sites all had less than 1 percent share. This is important to take into consideration when looking at how much Google+ jumped, or how much YouTube and LinkedIn slipped. That being said, StumbleUpon is gaining on Twitter, and we’ll be watching closely to see how it fares in the rest of the year.

Once again, the real winner here is Facebook, as you can see more clearly in the line graph above. Last month, the social networking giant drove more than twice the referrals of the remaining seven social media platforms sent to sites combined. Pinterest may be able to challenge it soon though, as it is now driving just over a third of the traffic Facebook is.

See also – More than half of Facebook’s referral traffic now comes from mobile and Report: Over the past year, search traffic has dropped while social traffic more than doubled

Top Image Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images