Among the eight most popular social media platforms, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Pinterest, and Twitter dominate the traffic referrals to the network of publishers of Shareaholic, a company engaged in distributing sharing widgets and monitoring traffic on the web.
Based on Shareaholic’s Social Media Traffic Report, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Pinterest, and Twitter represent 15.22% of the total traffic generated on the web last month. The study found that the social network giant’s share in traffic referrals increased by more than 58.81% while the micro-blogging company’s share climbed 54.12%. On the other hand, the content-sharing company’s traffic referrals share went up 66.52%
The traffic referral share of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s YouTube was 52.86%, and LinkedIn came in at 34.51%. Shareaholic noted that the growth rates of both companies are accelerating rapidly, which is not surprising for YouTube because of its popularity and the length of time spent by internet users on the platform. LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD)’s influencers program and media model are probably the main drivers for its fast growth in traffic referrals.
Social news site Reddit and discovery engine StumbleUpon suffered a decline in traffic referral share last month. The study showed that Reddit dropped by 27.47% while StumbleUpon fell by 35.16% from the same month a year earlier. Meanwhile, the traffic referrals of Google+ were only 0.04% for the month of September.
Google+ isn’t yet competitive
“Google+ isn’t yet competitive. Although Google+ referred a fair number of visits to online publishers last month (0.04% is a substantial number when we’re looking at a data set of hundreds of millions of visits), it is hardly a leading referral source. Google+ is consistently dwarfed by the competing social media sites,” wrote Danny Wong of Shareaholic.
The results of the Social Media traffic report was based on a data collected by Shareaholic from its 200,000 publishers with more than 250 million unique monthly visitors over the past 13 months.
A separate report from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) indicated that the average traffic referrals from its platform to media sites increased by 170% in September year-over-year.
Facebook’s director of partnerships, Andy Mitchell said the growth of traffic referrals on media sites can be attributed to the improvement in the news feed algorithm of the social network giant.
“We’re getting better at showing the right story at people who are interested in it,” said Mitchell. He added that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shared best practices with media firms.
