How Top Publishers' Social Referrals Are Divided

We recently looked at data from Shareaholic, which showed social media referral share by social network across Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, StumbleUpon, reddit, YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn:

As you can see, the data shows that Facebook is (by far) the biggest driver of social media traffic, with Pinterest at a distant second. Furthermore, according to this, Facebook is the only one driving more referrals compared to the previous quarter.

Emarketer has a new chart out, which makes use of data from Fractl and BuzzSumo. It shows social network referral share for articles worldwide by some of the top publishers, which provides an additional look at how some of the top social networks are driving traffic:

This chart also hammers home the point that Facebook is insanely dominant when it comes to social referrals. Nothing else comes even remotely close. It’s interesting that Mashable, compared to the other publishers, has its eggs in more baskets.

The fact that Facebook is messing with its News Feed algorithm so much these days should be concerning to all of the other publishers, which appear to rely on it so heartily. Obviously this doesn’t take into account other non-social traffic sources, such as search, direct visits, and email, but having nearly a hundred percent of your social traffic coming from one source seems somewhat dangerous – especially for the kind of site that feeds off of sharing.

Images via Shareaholic, Emarketer