We all know how formidable Facebook is,  as a social media site capable of generating traffic to websites and in terms of userbase as well. Next to Facebook, we always think of Twitter.  We never really thought about other sites, such as StumbleUpon perhaps? Now here’s an interesting statistics published by StatCounter covering the amount of traffic generated by social media sites that leads to website page views. The statistics cover Mar 2009 to Mar 2010. And guess what in 2009?  StumbleUpon use to bring more traffic to websites than Facebook does.

From March 2009 to July 2009, StumbleUpon was actually the number one social media sites that drives the most traffic to websites. Overall, from Mar 09 to Mar 10, StumbleUpon was second to Facebook in generating traffic to websites with 25% of social media hits, while Facebook had 48%. Twitter had 10% of social media hits.  The rest include – YouTube (6%), reddit (4%), Digg (2%) and MySpace (2%).

So, what’s the importance of these statistics? From a business perspective this only goes to show that social media sites could be a good tool for driving traffic to business sites. Hence, we now see more brands having their Facebook pages linked to their individual corporate websites.

Mr. Aodhan Cullen, CEO of Statcounter remarks:

“Social Media market share fluctuates a lot more than browser or search statistics. For example, Facebook peaked over Christmas and the New Year with almost three quarters of the total, perhaps reflecting its important role in communications between families and friends.”

In case you’re wondering StatCounter’s data was based on 13 billion page views across the globel StatCounter network of member sites.

So there, if your  company does not have a social media presence yet, you might want to start creating one on Facebook, especially now that there are many things happening with Facebook in terms of features and functionality.

Originally posted on April 22, 2010 @ 9:58 am