According to StatCounter’s GlobalStats research arm, Twitter now generates almost 10% of social media driven global hits to websites, while Facebook still reigns supreme as the primary source of traffic to global websites with almost half (48%) of ‘Social Media hits’.
Surprisingly, the number two social media traffic generator is not Twitter, but StumbleUpon with almost a quarter (25%). Furthermore, StatCounter claims StumbleUpon was number one ahead of Facebook in the US last month, in terms of traffic generation.
The data for March 2010 is said to be based on 13 billion page views across the global StatCounter network of member sites. The company only recently added social media services to its GlobalStats tool, and notes that its market share appears to fluctuate way more than browser or search statistics.
As you can tell from the graph above (larger version here), Facebook peaked around in the holiday period at the end of the year and is actually losing share fast, although still dominant with roughly half of social media traffic coming from the social network. StumbleUpon and Twitter have enjoyed a similar growth curve since the end of last year, although the former’s growth is clearly accelerating faster in comparison to Twitter.
StumbleUpon’s large share is surprising because it usually flies under the radar when it comes to traffic generation from social services on the Web. Perhaps it owes its high rank to the fact that its main reason of being is having users discover third-party websites, while Twitter and Facebook are not only about sharing links but also status, location and activity updates as well as media like photos and videos.
Then again, Digg didn’t even make it to the top 5 in StatCounter’s research.
Update: commenters have suggested that StatCounter is under-counting Twitter’s share because of the plethora of third-party clients out there. We’re well aware of this and have requested StatCounter to clarify how they measure referring sites – so far we haven’t heard back.
The top Social Media sites to generate global website traffic after Facebook, StumbleUpon and Twitter are YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%). LinkedIn was ranked at 12 out of 25 monitored services with 0.34%, while Google Buzz was not yet included in the research.
On a sidenote: in June 2009, we posted a statistical breakdown of where our traffic comes from (not limited to social media sites).
StatCounter, a free online visitor stats tool. It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features. StatCounter currently has over two million members and tracks in excess of ten billion pageloads per month over its network of three million websites. ...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...
StumbleUpon is the easiest way to discover new and interesting things from across the Web. More than 20 million users turn to StumbleUpon to be informed, entertained and surprised by content and information recommended just for them. In addition, more than 60,000 brands, publishers and other marketers have used StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery platform to promote their products and services. For more information, visit www.StumbleUpon.com. Explore more.
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...
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