Facebook Is Still A Runaway Winner In Social Referral Traffic Race

When it comes to driving social referral traffic, there’s Facebook and the seven dwarfs, a reality driven home again by Shareaholic’s third quarter report released today.

Facebook accounted for 22.36% of total referral traffic to publishers in the Shareaholic network in September. That’s four times more than second-place Pinterest (5.52%) and three times more than Pinterest and the next six networks — Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn — combined.

Facebook maintained its dominance despite a slight slip — 1.03 percentage points — since the second quarter, a reduction that Shareaholic reports across nearly all of the top social networks. Only Google+, which eked out a 0.01 percentage point gain, and LinkedIn (0.02 percentage points) showed a quarter-over-quarter gain, but as you can see in the chart below the referral traffic share for each of those networks is basically a rounding error.

Shareaholic’s year-over-year figures are also interesting. Social referral traffic from the eight top networks accounted for 29.49% of overall traffic — direct traffic, social referrals, organic search, paid search, etc. — publishers received last month. That’s up from 16.44% during the same time in 2013.

Facebook and Pinterest drove the lion’s share of that growth, with Facebook more than doubling its total share and Pinterest growing 50%. Google+ also had strong growth percentage wise (57%) but again makes up for a tiny part of the total.

The rest of the top social networks have slipped significantly according to Shareaholic’s data, which the company pulls from the 300,000 sites that use its software. Twitter’s share has slipped 0.29 percentage points and 24% since last September, dropping to 0.88. That’s still twice as high as fourth-place Stumble Upon.

Read more about the report on the Shareaholic blog.