Social discovery and sharing platform Shareaholic today released a report covering referral traffic data from the eight largest social media sites in Q4 2013. In short, Facebook, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and Google+ all gained, while Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn lost.
Taking a closer look at the data, however, shows that only the top three are really worth considering. Here’s the breakdown from Shareholic, which tracks 250 million users visiting its network of 200,000 publishers:
The numbers in the month columns are represented as “share of visits,” a percentage of overall traffic (direct, social referrals, organic search, paid search, and so on) that sites received. The change column shows how much each social network’s share of visits grew or declined.
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Facebook’s referral traffic share grew from 10.37 percent to 15.44 percent, Pinterest was up from 3.68 percent to 4.79 percent, while Twitter dipped from 1.17 percent to 1.12 percent. In other words, 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 you look how much StumbleUpon or Google+ jumped, or the declines of Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn. While their changes were all in double digits, their shares are too low in this market pie for those figures to be significant, especially in a single quarter.
As is typical in these studies, the real winner here turns out to be Facebook, as you can see more clearly in the line graph above. Last month, the social networking giant drove more than twice the referrals all seven of the other social media platforms sent to sites combined.
See also – Facebook’s referral traffic has exploded over the last year, and mobile now accounts for over a quarter 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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