Facebook Drives Nearly One-Fourth Of All Referral Traffic [Shareaholic Report]

Facebook, the king of social media referral traffic, is strengthening its reign, according to social analytics and publishing firm Shareaholic.

In June, Facebook generated 23.39% of the total share of visits to Shareaholic’s network of 300,000 websites. That total, a gain of 10.09% and 2.14 percentage points since March, is the highest Shareaholic has ever registered for Facebook.

Meanwhile, all of Facebook’s social competitors registered decreases in referral traffic since the first quarter. Second-place Pinterest (5.72%) fell 19% and 1.38 percentage points and third-place Twitter (1.03%) fell 9.9% and 0.11 percentage points. Twitter’s share remains more than the total of Stumble Upon, Reddit, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined.

The Facebook growth is single-handedly driving the social referral category to new heights, Shareaholic data shows. Since June of 2013, Facebook’s referral total has risen 150% and 14 percentage points. That growth has led a year-over-year doubling — from 15 to 31% — of social referral traffic for the top eight social networks. Only Facebook, Pinterest and StumbleUpon have shown growth since June of 2013, as this chart shows (click to enlarge):

Read more analysis of the report at the Shareaholic blog.

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.