We're not surprised that Pinterest drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter. But some people were.

The chart below, made by Statista from Shareaholic research, shows Facebook is king of the traffic referrals among Shareaholic's user base.

10% of the traffic on websites from 200,000 publishers comes from the world's largest social network.

 

Pinterest comes in second, way out in front of much older Twitter.

We think Pinterest is just getting started as a commercial traffic driver, so this doesn't surprise us.

Clipped from http://www.statista.com/topics/1164/social-networks/chart/1549/social-traffic-sources/

 

The Shareaholic article covers the rest of the pack too- StumbleUpon and Reddit decline in referrals, YouTube and LinkedIn gain share at a decent clip.

Google+ is stomped by the competition, basically flatlined on the graph. However, there's a lively discussion in the article comments, about why marketers still can't afford to ignore Google+. We found this article by Mike Allton important reading, especially the quote below.

Unlike Facebook or Twitter posts, anytime someone shares a post to Google+, that post is quickly indexed by Google and can potentially appear within search engine results. That means that people may find publisher's articles via search results and click through to the original article.

Articles that conclusively prove some social stream is #1 are everywhere. And new contenders are constantly being held up as the next big thing (see this article on billion-user app WeChat!)

But we still believe what Dorie Clark said in Forbes last year: "No One in Marketing Knows What They're Doing". We say make good, Hummingbird-friendly content, even though you never wanted to be a publisher, and stay alert.

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