Pinterest The Fastest Growing Site For Referral Traffic; Beats Youtube & LinkedIn

If you aren’t already on the visual sharing site Pinterest, then consider this another reason (among many others) to sign up to the service. It has experienced the fastest growing site in terms of referral traffic than any other social media site. Its volume of traffic is so great that if you combined the referral traffic of LinkedIn, Youtube, Google+ and Reddit, it still wouldn’t beat the growth experienced by Pinterest.

The findings, compiled by content sharing company Shareaholic, looked at aggregated data from more than 200,000 different publishers, reaching a combined total of more than 260 million unique visitors every month.

Overall, Pinterest only commands 3.6% of all referral traffic since January, with its nearest rival being Youtube (1.05%). The greatest site for referral traffic is Facebook which commanded 26.4% of all referral traffic last month, more than four times greater than its nearest competitor StumbleUpon (5.07%).

Following those two sites is Google (incorporating services such as Google news, Google Images, Gmail etc.) with 3.62% and Twitter with 3.61%. Facebook is also notable as it was the second fastest growing referral site after Pinterest.

What’s more impressive about this is that the site isn’t officially opened as it’s invite only: you either have to put yourself on a waiting list or have one of your friends who’s already on the service to invite you. The idea behind Pinterest is for users to find and share items and images they find online. This is all organised into categories and different pinboards that’s meant to appeal or inspire users.