This Graph Shows How FaceBook Can Make or Break Your Site

According to Shareaholic’s 2014 report on Social Media Traffic Referrals, Facebook beat all other social networks in referring traffic to publishers.  What does that mean exactly?  Have you ever clicked on a link a colleague or friend posted onto Facebook because it caught your eye?  Then congratulations, you are a statistic of the referred traffic.

As stated in the report, by the end of September of this year, Facebook was referring 22.35% of all traffic.  That is over four times the amount of referring traffic driven by Pinterest, and more than three times the amount of referring traffic driven by all other social network sites combined.  The data came from a 13 month collection of website traffic from over 200,000 sites that generate over 250 million unique monthly visitors worldwide.  See the stats in Shareaholic’s chart below:

Impressive, right?  To dig a little deeper, the third quarter was also heavily analyzed after collecting data from June 2014- September 2014 from over 300,000 websites that reached over 400 million unique monthly global visitors.  The third quarter percentages are displayed in the chart below:

StumbleUpon, Reddit, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn referred less than 1% of all traffic individually.  Although Facebook was down 1.03%  in traffic referrals by the end of third quarter, they were still sitting well above the rest.

More traffic doesn’t necessarily equate to more sales, but it can’t hurt.  So if you are looking to increase traffic to your website or user engagement, and hopefully increase potential sales, then take these stats into consideration and make sure your Facebook account is up and running!