YouTube is the “undisputed champion” among social networks in terms of driving referrals, delivering the most traffic and the highest levels of engagement, according to a new study from Shareaholic. The analysis of average visit duration, pages per visit and bounce rate reveals which of the top eight social media platforms are driving the best referral traffic.
YouTube drives the most engaged referrals, with the lowest average bounce rate (43.19%), the highest pages per visit (2.99) and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds). Viewers clearly engage longer with video, and are quite receptive to clicking on related content.
Both Google+ and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals out of the eight platforms studies, but the visitors they bring in are high quality. Google+ users spend more than 3 minutes on average examining content, visit 2.45 pages, and have a low bounce rate of 50.63%. LinkedIn users spend an average of 2 minutes and 13 seconds per click, view 2.23 pages and bounce 51.28% of the time. While traffic from these two social networks remains low, engagement is impressive.
Tied in fourth place are Twitter and Facebook, with similar results. Bounce rate is the same for both platforms (56.35%), and while Twitter referrals view 2.15 pages per visit, Facebook users view 2.03 pages. Facebook users stay on site for 127.44 seconds, Twitter users for slightly less (123.10).
As for the remaining three platforms:
- Pinterest sees a similar bounce rate to Twitter and Facebook, but just 1.71 pages per visit, and about half the average visit duration (64.67 seconds)
- Reddit users show a high bounce rate (70.16%)
- StumbleUpon comes in last, with the least engaged referrals: 1.5 pages per visit and just 54.99 seconds on site
How much traffic does your site receive from social media referrals? How engaged are those visitors with your content?
The study examined 6 months of data (Sept 2013 – Feb 2014) across Shareaholic’s network of 200,000+ sites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors. Download the report here: Shareaholic’s “Social Referrals That Matter” Report.
