Social Media Referral Traffic Trumps Organic

In continuing with our social media focus this week, we turn to a recent Marketing land article that talks about the impact of social media in driving referrals.

According to the findings of Shareaholic:

• Social media continues to drive more referrals than organic search.
  

• Facebook’s share of referral traffic has soared 277.26% since December 2011. Facebook’s user growth during that time is 60% — from 845 million monthly active users to 1.35 billion.
  
• Pinterest is still solidly in second place, but it has been steadily losing ground since its high point of 7.10% last March.
  
• Twitter continues to lose share after a 2014 high of 1.15% in July when it was riding an engagement wave during the World Cup soccer tournament. It fell below the 1% threshold in August and fell to an all-time low of 0.82% in December.
  
• StumbleUpon, besides Facebook the only other service to show a quarterly gain, has lost 69.41% of its traffic share since December 2011.
  
• Reddit with a 0.15% share has lost nearly half of its share of traffic since 2011 and Google+ (0.04%) and LinkedIn (0.03%) have each lost a third of its traffic.
  
  

Read the Marketing Land article here and the full Shareaholic report here.