Turns out it doesn’t matter how many visitors a social media site has quite as much as it matters how much referral traffic it generates.
Makes sense: while the owners of a popular social media destination might be thrilled to have visitors and members in the millions, those numbers don’t help businesses understand if their activity doesn’t drive people back to their home page, picture or story.
And one to watch of late in the referral traffic game is Pinterest. The latest numbers from Shareaholic, big fans of the referral traffic numbers game, says the visually driven social site is on the rise, capturing 1.19% of Web referrals compared to 0.85% in January.
It’s moved past Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing and Google (not its main search engine but other sites such as Google+.
FYI, it’s the main Google page that’s really running the referral traffic game, with 46.8% of referrals, but that’s down from 48.9% in January. Facebook is a big player too with 5.65%, the biggest social media site on the list.
StumbleUpon and Twitter are based on the idea of referrals: you come here, we send you elsewhere. The fact that Pinterest is surpassing them is of major interest. It’s amore proof the pinning site, which has more than 12 million users, is really capturing imaginations, and clicks.
And more evidence that the value of a social media service can be measured in a myriad of ways. For those who hang out, it’s about sticking around and chatting. For those who want to promote a business, it’s about clicking out.
Tags: pinterest, referrals, Social Media
[...] traffic has always been a factor in a brand’s online success. As marketing consultant Mark Evans points out, generating referral traffic is more important than the number of visitors you receive. This is [...]