As most major social networks continue to grow in popularity, the amount of referral traffic being generated by them also grows. According to reports from several sites referral traffic from social networks is growing steadily. So which network sends the most traffic?
Turns out that according to Shareaholic, Facebook is the number one source of referral traffic with 25.6% of the market share in December and 26.4% of the market share in January. Other sites such as StumbleUpon, Google and Twitter also contribute to the numbers.
| Social Network | Percentage of Total Referral Traffic (Jan 2012) |
|---|---|
| 26.40% | |
| StumbleUpon | 5.07% |
| 3.62% | |
| 3.61% | |
| 3.60% | |
| YouTube | 1.05% |
| 0.83% | |
| Google Plus | 0.22% |
| 0.20% | |
| MySpace | 0.01% |
Newcomer Pinterest is generating a good amount of referral traffic. According to a report from Shareaholic, this site is generating more traffic than sites like Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube put together.
In December, Pinterest had 2.5% of the market share while in January they contributed 3.6% of the referrals. This growth is especially impressive when you consider that in July last year they sent only a miniscular 0.17% of referrals.
StumbleUpon, which holds the second position for referral traffic had 6.5% of the market share in December, but has fallen to 5.07% in January.
Facebook and StumbleUpon’s relatively large share of traffic referrals has been corroborated by reports from StatCounter in the past.
Although Google Plus contributes a very small amount of the total share of referrals – just 0.22% – other Google sites such as Google news, Google Images and Gmail continue to be major sources of traffic.
