The Status of Social Referral Traffic in Q4 2013

It’s no secret that social media presence is a strong asset for sites that want to drive traffic to their pages. With the development of new social networks and the (sometimes inexplicable) urgency for broad digital presence, it’s really important to measure which social channels work best and help in succeeding the goals set.

Also Read: Social Brand Advocates – How to Reward Them

Shareaholic released its report on social referral traffic for 2013 and the results are pretty solid. The research is based based on four months of data collected from over 200,000 websites that reach more than 250 million unique visitors each month.

#Shareaholic’s research on social referral traffic shows the behavior of over 250m unique visitors.

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Percentages correspond to the amount of traffic generated from social networks compared to the total traffic and the last two columns represent the change in growth.

Some important outcomes:

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Facebook increased its share on social referral traffic by 48.85% and holds the first place.
Pinterest is named the 2nd social referral traffic generator.
Twitter sees a drop in its traffic share.
StumbleUpon surpasses Reddit and shows an impressive growth of 54.36%.

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While the first three social networks are the ones who actually hold a major role in website traffic, you cannot disregard the small players on the table. Could these stats signify the slow death of Reddit and the surge of Google+? It’s surely too early to tell, as the 5 lasts places on the board account for less than 1% of the total traffic.

You may see the impact of Facebook generated traffic compared to the other social networks on the graph below: