When you talk Social Media most people immediately refer to two options: Facebook and Twitter. So when a company decides it wants to go and implement Social Media on its website, they right away put up the Tweet and Like or Share buttons. But the question is, what drives the most traffic and what drives the most conversion?

When it comes to driving traffic in the US there is a for some surprising winner to this ‘contest’: not Facebook or Twitter, but Stumbleupon is the biggest social traffic driver in the US. That is what numbers over 2010 from Statcounter show us. StumbleUpon accounted for about 43%, while Facebook accounted for about 38%. Twitter was only good for 5%, a little bit less than YouTube (7%) and a little bit more than Reddit (4%).

The stats show us that Facebook and Stumbleupon have been competing in the US over the best scores through the entire year. For the majority of the year Facebook has been the most traffic generating social network, but also early 2010 Stumbleupon reached above the numbers of Facebook. The big gap in favor of Facebook which was there in August however has completely vanished. The numbers are even more interesting if you keep in mind that Stumbleupon ‘only’ has about 13 million users, where Facebook has 500 million.

Being an international blog we off course then also need to look at other parts of the world, and there we see a totally different kind of chart. There is no doubt onto which Social Network drives the most traffic in Europe: Facebook (65%). Stumbleupon here comes in third with just 10% behind YouTube (16%). Twitter in Europe also accounts for only 5%.

In Asia the gap is even bigger. Here we see Facebook leading with 87% followed on a very long distance by YouTube (6%) and Twitter (3%).

WordlWide we also see that Facebook remains the biggest social traffic driver. Stumbleupon is the second largest one with 21% and again YouTube is third.

These numbers also make clear that Twitter is not the traffic driving force it seems to be. All these huge amount of followers not necessarily drive that much traffic. But is must be said that that differs a lot from one industry to another. In our industry (search and social) it will be a lot bigger compared to other industries for example.

It is also clear by these numbers that if you are implementing Social Media with a traffic driving purpose, you should think carefully, not only about the kind of traffic you are attracting, but also about where your target audience is located.

Posted in News, Social Media | Tags: Facebook, News, Social Media, statistics, stumbleupon