Facebook is the King of Social Referrals

Stephen McCance July 24, 2014

In the second quarter of 2014 Facebook were responsible for 23.39% of all referral traffic from social media websites, up a whopping 10% on the previous quarter, the biggest losers being LinkedIn (down 57.38%) and StumbleUpon (down 39.12%).

The results have been released from a study by Shareaholic’s quarterly report from 4 months of findings with data from over 300, 000 websites reaching upwards of 400 million visitors each month. The report included the results of the top 8 social media sites for referral traffic and the order came as follows:

Credit to Shareaholic From the data it can be revealed that Facebook users love to click links on their news feed and last month’s Facebook stats of 23.39% demonstrate this. Facebook coming out top is not surprising with the idea of sharing links to each other’s pages and news feeds common practise. When users see a link that they like and then go on to share it on Facebook the link is then exposed to a large audience of people on your news feed. If an individual is then to see this link and click on it then it can now be said that Facebook has referred traffic to your website. Pinterest was second with 5.72% of all referrals in June this year. The positions for the top three places have stayed the same for the past few quarters and many may find it surprising that Pinterest is in second position, although their referral traffic share has fallen substantially from 7.10% to 5.72%. Share Traffic values are likely to fluctuate however the question is posed over the reasons for Pinterest’s dip this quarter. Despite this however Pinterest remains solidly in second place with Twitter lagging behind at 1.03%. These results help to show how Facebook is the leading social network for referral traffic by a significant amount. There have been recent reports about Facebook becoming a dying network with teenagers leaving the site for instant messaging apps, these results however seem to show quite the opposite reflecting how popular the site still is. All in all these eight social referral sites drove 31.07% of the total traffic in June 2014, reflecting the real power that social networks have in driving traffic to websites.