Pinterest still exploding
Visual social media has been the big hit of 2012, with visual bookmarking site Pinterest leading the way alongside photo sharing tool, Instagram. New data from Shareaholic1 reveals that referral traffic from Pinterest still surpasses Twitter, as it has for months, and now surpasses StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google referral traffic (note: Shareaholic considers Google referral traffic to be referrals that don’t come through AdWords or organic search, nor through Google+, but through Google sites like Google Groups).
This study echoes recent data from Monetate2, noting that while Facebook has the highest user counts, Pinterest has skyrocketed from 0.68 percent of referral traffic in the first quarter of 2011 to 26 percent in the first quarter of 2012, as Facebook drops from 88 percent of e-commerce referrals to 59 percent in the same period.
The real surprise
Shareaholic has long reported that Pinterest surpasses Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined when it comes to referral traffic, and now reports that Pinterest’s referral traffic jumped from 0.85 percent in January to 1.19 percent in June. Twitter referral traffic rose from 0.82 percent in February to 0.92 percent in June, with the big surprise being Pinterest beating StubmleUpon’s referral traffic which has long boasted dramatic traffic.
The study is based on Shareoholic’s network of over 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly and is reinforcement that Pinterest should be taken seriously by anyone working on their SEO. While we have long written about the pitfalls of Pinterest (copyright infringement, scams, etc.), the benefits are widely underutilized by brands, but are being discovered by consumers internationally.
1 Shareaholic data
2 Monetate study
