Which Social Media Platform Drives More Traffic?

Social media can bring in significant traffic to your website. If you or your company has accounts set up on various social media platforms, you probably use them to broadcast out new information along with links to your blog or site. Do you know which platform brings in the most traffic for most publishers? Are you maximizing your efforts through social media in order to boost your site's traffic?
A survey of 200,000 publishers from Mashable revealed that 10.4% of their website traffic in September of 2013 originated from Facebook. This represents a dramatic increase compared to September of 2012 where the same publishers only saw 6.5% of their traffic from Facebook. These large numbers from Facebook probably won't surprise you much, but what might catch your attention is the platform which took the second spot.
Pinterest provided more traffic than any of the other large social media platforms. You may have expected Twitter to come in second, but Pinterest provided 3.7% of their traffic in September compared to Twitter's 1.2%. When comparing yearly growth, Pinterest grew by 1.5% and Twitter grew by 0.4%.
Aside from the somewhat shocking news that Pinterest provided the second-most traffic for these publishers, the biggest takeaway here might be the overall increase in traffic originating through social media. In September of 2013, these publishers saw 16.34% of their traffic coming from social media compared to 11.04% from September of 2012.
Are you embracing social media? As you can see in the statistics above, publishers are finding tremendous success in generating traffic with social media. While the usual players (Facebook and Twitter) are still responsible for big numbers, Pinterest may be an avenue your company should place a larger interest in due to it's growth.
If you're new to the social media scene or if you're looking to overhaul your strategy due to some of the findings above, contact Seafoam Media. We specialize in the latest social media strategies and our goal is to make your company shine on whichever platform you choose.