According to the latest Shareaholic Social Media Traffic Report, Facebook drove four times more traffic than Pinterest to third party sites in Q3 2014. While many social media users are critical of Facebook at this time, the user base of the website is still almost as big as the population of China, and the platform is showing remarkable staying power. The report examined eight of the most popular social networks, and measured the amount of traffic each generated as a percentage of total traffic. Total traffic included direct traffic, organic search, paid search and visits from social media. The social networks that were counted for the study were: Facebook Google Plus LinkedIn Pinterest Reddit StumbleUpon Twitter YouTube In June 2014, Facebook was responsible for delivering almost a quarter of the total visits that sites from around the web received. Since then, the traffic share of Facebook has shrunk slightly as the network has seen some backlash because of privacy concerns relating to the Facebook messenger app, but the impact on the network’s popularity has not been as significant as some people may have assumed. Facebook’s traffic generation levels fell significantly in July and August, but made a significant recovery in September. It is unclear whether the traffic slipped during the summer months because users were spending less time on social networks in general in the summer, or because of issues relating to Facebook specifically. Over the last quarter, the site has still driven around four times more traffic than Pinterest, the second most popular social network in terms of sending traffic. Third place goes to Twitter, which on average generated less than one fifth of the traffic of Pinterest. Pinterest remains one of the most popular social media websites among young women, but is gradually becoming a popular network for other demographics to. Out of the eight social networks that were considered in the study, only two of them generated more traffic at the end of the third quarter than they did at the end of Q2. The remaining networks all saw their traffic shares slip, and by a greater margin than LinkedIn and Google+ prophesied. The remaining change in traffic can be accounted for by direct visits, an increase in the use of search engines in general, or the use of other social media websites that are not included in the survey, such as Ello, Instagram and other niche-specific networks and websites.
31st October 2014
