We All Know Social Media Can Send Massive Traffic to Our Sites: You Might Be Surprised By the Leaders

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share

In the old days, three years ago, Digg ruled social media.  Five years ago it was Slashdot.  If you could get your story on the front page then it was good for tens of thousands of visitors a day.  It looks like times have changed and the new social media power houses aren’t exactly obvious.  You’re going to assume that it’s Facebook and Twitter, but you may be surprised by what percentage of traffic is derived from each site.

According to StatCounter, the free counter site that many of us have on our sites, Facebook was the obvious winner with almost half of all traffic from social media(48%) derived from links on their site.  The data comes from 13 billion pageviews across all the sites in the StatCounter network so it gives a pretty solid representation of what’s happening on the net.  The second biggest driver of traffic…….Twitter?  Nope.  StumbleUpon.  Surprisingly,  StumbleUpon sent 25% of all social media traffic.  Twitter was a very distant 8.3%.

This data certainly doesn’t weigh the quality of the traffic but merely the numbers.  If you were to ask any site owner which type of traffic they would like to have and I think they would certainly rank it Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, Digg, and then Stumbleupon.   The data also is a bit misleading in the fact that Facebook traffic is spread out between many many more sites due to the amazing amount of users.  Sites like digg and reddit spread the daily traffic among 100 or less sites, giving those sites a concentrated hit of traffic.

Here are the top 7

1. Facebook (48.9%)

2. StumbleUpon (24.91%)

3. Twitter (8.53%)

4. Youtube (6.14%)

5. Reddit (4.14%)

6.MySpace (1.73%)

7. Digg (1.65)

Various Other Sites weighed in with small percentages to make up the balance. LinkedIn came in 12th with .34%