{"id":14849,"date":"2013-12-10T11:00:07","date_gmt":"2013-12-10T16:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.shareaholic.com\/?p=14849"},"modified":"2014-07-25T11:40:30","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T15:40:30","slug":"facebook-referrals-skyrocket-12-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shareaholic.com\/blog\/facebook-referrals-skyrocket-12-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook Referrals Skyrocket: up 170% in past year, 47% over last month"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Shareaholic.com<\/a>At Shareaholic, our discovery and sharing platform powers content promotion for over 200,000 sites across the web. Are you ready to turn your site’s visitors into raving fans?\u00a0Unlock Shareaholic here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Last month, Facebook\u00a0announced its first redesign<\/a>\u00a0of the Like and Share buttons believing the new buttons would increase social engagement among readers.<\/p>\n

Our data suggests\u00a0they were right<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Welcome to Shareaholic’s 1st edition of the Facebook Referrals Report<\/strong>.\u00a0Our findings are based on 13 months of data collected from 200,000+ publishers who reach 250+ million unique monthly visitors — a significant sample set that allows us to observe general trends in inbound traffic sites receive.<\/p>\n

Here’s the data (click to enlarge)<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"Shareaholic<\/a><\/p>\n

In similar fashion to our Social Media Traffic Report<\/a>, we tracked how many referrals Facebook drove to our network of publishers and displayed those figures as “share of visits,” a percentage of overall traffic\u00a0— direct traffic, social referrals, organic search, paid search, etc. — sites received.*<\/p>\n

Here are two main findings from Shareaholic’s Facebook Referrals Report:<\/p>\n

1) Facebook’s share of visits skyrocketed (increasing 169.88%) in the past year<\/strong>. From November 2012 through October 2013, we saw steady, incremental growth in Facebook’s share of visits. Then, the social platform saw its share of visits really take off during November 2013.<\/p>\n

2) In the last month alone, its share of visits jumped 47.44%.\u00a0<\/strong>Increasing share of visits by 5.60 percentage points in a month is no small feat. But it’s Facebook we’re talking about, and Zuckerberg probably isn’t done shocking the world.<\/p>\n

\"mark<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Shareaholic does not offer the new FB buttons among our own\u00a0share buttons<\/a>, we still track inbound traffic on sites that use any of our other offerings (analytics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0related content<\/a>). Some of our publishers have adopted the new Like and Share buttons from Facebook and are obviously reaping the benefits. Others that use our share buttons still see gains in Facebook referral traffic.<\/p>\n

And those gains are remarkable.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Shareaholic<\/a><\/p>\n

How is it that even though Shareaholic does not offer the new Like and Share buttons that our publishers still realize such substantial gains on referral traffic from Facebook?<\/p>\n

I hypothesize that FB users have developed more natural inclinations towards sharing — and interacting with — content for four reasons:<\/p>\n

1) Facebook’s news feed is more engaging than ever <\/strong>(thus, more clicks, likes and shares)<\/strong>. Like Google<\/a> with it’s mercurial search ranking algorithm, Facebook’s news feed has seen a couple of<\/a>\u00a0noteworthy tweaks<\/a>\u00a0which keep users highly engaged with their feeds.<\/p>\n

2) Active user counts\u00a0continue to grow.<\/strong>\u00a0Facebook’s 3rd quarter announcement<\/a> revealed daily active user numbers jumped 25% year-over-year to 728 million. Monthly active users grew 18% in that same timeframe to a staggering\u00a01.19 billion. A growing number of active users increases\u00a0Facebook’s utility for users as well user dependency on FB for social interactions. The network effect at its finest.<\/em><\/p>\n

3) The omnipresence of the new Like and Share buttons impacts behavior<\/strong>. Given the usable nature of the new buttons and their widespread availability — Facebook’s buttons are viewed<\/a> 22+ billion times a day across 7.5+ million sites around the web — people have developed a habit of sharing content they enjoy. Although not all share buttons are created equal, share buttons in general are being utilized more often by readers, thus driving more traffic to sites.<\/p>\n

4) Sharing is now an ego-gratifying activity that’s socially acceptable and universally commonplace.<\/strong> Sites such as Buzzfeed, Thought Catalog and Elite Daily produce super viral content that make sharing such a reflexive activity — that also injects you with a healthy dose of serotonin\u00a0when all your friends like, share and comment on your post. Effectively, sharing great content is now a no-brainer.<\/p>\n

\"facebook\"<\/a>Of course, I can be wrong about all of these points.<\/p>\n

In any case, our data suggests Facebook drives more than 1\/6 of an average site’s overall traffic. Given that it is one of millions of possible traffic referral sources, that’s pretty significant.<\/p>\n

How have you witnessed referrals from Facebook grow over time?<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

* Our data is represented as “share of visits” because the volume of visits (and uniques) our publishers receive changes month-to-month. Last year, we tracked ~250mm monthly uniques; last month, we gathered data from ~320mm unique visitors. Visits grew by a comparable clip too.\u00a0Ultimately, sharing our raw data \u2014 hundreds of millions of visits \u2014 wouldn\u2019t enable site owners to appropriately benchmark their site\u2019s traffic against what publishers received.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Shareaholic<\/a><\/p>\n

Interested in learning more about Facebook referrals (and seeing updated numbers)? See\u00a0our most recent Shareaholic studies<\/a>. Questions? Email us: press@shareaholic.com<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Shareaholic, our discovery and sharing platform powers content promotion for over 200,000 sites across the web. Are you ready to turn your site’s visitors… 
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