Which Social Media Site Gets the Most Referral Traffic?

One very big advantage to having a social media presence is that it helps build out a company’s overall web presence and keeps the referral traffic steady for businesses or organizations. While almost every major social media site can contribute referral traffic for a website, there’s only one that tops them all!

According to a recent quarterly report by Shareaholic, Facebook remains cream of the crop when it comes to driving social referral traffic. The study reveals that while social media contributes to 30% of overall referral traffic received by publishers, marketers, and site owners, a majority of the traffic (22%) comes from Facebook.

Shareaholic’s report looked at the top eight most popular social networks: Facebook Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Pinterest, which took second place behind Facebook reported four times less referral traffic at 5.5%.

Meanwhile, Twitter faced a 13-month low, making up just 0.88% of the social referral pie ending in September 2014. This is a 24% drop from its numbers same time last year. LinkedIn and Google+ came out with a slight gain. The chart below shows the difference each social platform experienced throughout each quarter this year, with the difference in amount of visits lost or gained in the far right two columns:

This Shareaholic quarterly study pulls the data of 300,000 sites that use its software, that’s about 400 million users total. The websites range from small blog websites to commercial websites with various audiences, which gives it a dynamic sample size for its findings.

What does this mean for businesses and organizations? Despite what you might have heard, Facebook is still a big deal. According to Tech Crunch and Shareaholic’s Danny Wong, “Facebook has never not been in first position, and over time, as Facebook has picked up more users, and has played with its algorithms for the surfacing news and introduced video and other formats, it has only grown its percentage.”