Social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic today released its quarterly report for referral traffic from the eight largest social media sites. In Q2 2014, Facebook gained share, while Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn all fell.
As in the company’s previous reports, however, only the top three social networks 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 last two columns show 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.
Facebook’s referral traffic share grew from 21.25 percent to 23.39 percent, Pinterest fell from 7.10 percent to 5.72 percent, while Twitter slipped from 1.14 percent to 1.03 percent. In the last two quarters, Facebook and Pinterest showed phenomenal growth given their positions, while Twitter remained essentially flat. This time, Facebook continued to plow forward, leaving its competitors behind.
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The other five sites all had less than 1 percent share combined. It’s worth noting that StumbleUpon was previously gaining on Twitter, but this quarter hurt more than helped its chances.
The line graph above better shows just how far ahead Facebook is. Last month, the social networking giant drove more than three times the referrals of the remaining seven social media platforms sent to sites combined. In March, that number was only two-fold.
Year-over-year, only Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon saw their “share of traffic” grow. Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn saw their shares steadily decline or sharply nosedive.
Here’s the bigger picture: these eight social referral sites drove 31.07 percent of overall traffic in June 2014. The number has more than doubled: it was at just 15.55 percent in June 2013.
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
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