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a recent study by Shareaholic found that post-click engagement with Facebook posts trailed far behind the results delivered by YouTube, and also lagged behind Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Shareaholic examined six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors

YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate (43.19 percent), the highest pages per visit (2.99), and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds).

video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions that complement the audio and visual content they just consumed.

Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.

In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?

Digg sent 1.4 million referrals to publishers in February 2013, compared with 75,000 referrals in February 2012.

While Digg remains behind both StumbleUpon and Fark, which sent between 2 and 3 million referrals to publishers in February, it's growing while these platforms are not. And to put the referral numbers in additional context, Digg is now on par with Tumblr, a platform with more than 100 million users, in terms of referral traffic. Tumblr sent 1.3 million referrals to network publishers in February.

Since September, referrals from Facebook have grown 48.85 percent, and represented 17.41 percent of all website referrals in November.

The findings were based on 200,000 websites from around the world, accounting for more than 250 million unique visitors each month.

Last month, this behemoth of a social network drove more than twice the referrals all 7 of the other social media platforms sent to sites, combined.

Shareaholic also found that Facebook mobile drove 8.25 percent of visits to its network of sites in January, while Facebook overall was responsible for 16.21 percent, meaning that mobile accounted for more than one-half of referrals from the social network.

Recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithms have lavished online publishers with unprecedented referral traffic, creating a ripple effect throughout the news industry. In September, stately newspaper sites set a digital traffic record, seeing an 11% gain in visitors since June, while Facebook referrals from BuzzFeed’s diverse partner network of sites increased by 69% from August to October.

But traffic-bound publishers are growing anxious that yet another algorithm change could erase the big gains of the last few months — that traffic could disappear just as quickly as it came. “We’re starting to get very nervous,” one staffer at a major paper told BuzzFeed. “It’s scary that they can get everyone hooked on such high referral traffic then take it away so quickly with a quick flip of their algorithm,”

“They’re gonna keep tinkering with the algorithm, so I expect the referral surge will taper off. I’m not worried, though. Facebook has a hundred billion reasons why they need to support ‘high-quality content,’ which means they won’t abandon publishers anytime soon.”

Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide

Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

it could also be because Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s not a big picture study here – just a slice.

Since September, the share of visits from Facebook mobile increased 197 percent. Overall, Facebook mobile drove 8.25 percent of the visits Shareaholic’s network of 200,000+ sites reaching 250+ million uniques received in January. Since Facebook’s total share of visits was 16.21 percent, mobile made up more than half (nearly 51 percent) of Facebook referrals.

advertising technology called remarketing has proven alienating to online consumers. Remarketing, which lets advertisers follow someone around the Internet with a display ad, based on a previous search engine query, specific site visit, or other online action by the user, has increased in popularity in recent years.

The rapid spread of SnapChat--the picture sharing app that auto-deletes photos after ten seconds--shows that young people increasingly understand the need to keep some things secret, or at least to control the visibility and content of their communications. The migration of Millennials away from Facebook to the more anonymous Tumblr may be another sign. And the outcry raised by young Tumblr users in the wake of news that Yahoo! was purchasing the platform--driven by fears of more corporate control and increased advertising--only underscores the point.

Millennials are in the vanguard of mainstream online behavior: they were first on Facebook (after college students invited to the join in its earliest days), followed by their parents. A Millennial move towards greater online secrecy could represent the beginning of a larger shift that warrants additional research.

According to data collected from the BuzzFeed Partner network, which tracks visitors to an assortment of major news and entertainment sites with over 350 million combined monthly visitors, Facebook accounts for over 75 million — more than 20%. The number is certainly higher for many newer media organizations, such as BuzzFeed, whose audiences depend on social networks for news.

The rise of Facebook referrals in the BuzzFeed network has corresponded, at least recently, with a fall in Google referrals. One, in other words, is replacing the other. But replacements are never exact: Facebook overtaking MySpace, a superficially similar service, had the effect of pumping millions of eyeballs to outside media organizations; as Facebook's real, identity-bound photos and personal information glued users to the site in a way that MySpace's cluttered data never could, Facebook's News Feed directed them outward in a way that MySpace's blog-centric design never did.

Recent research suggests that the next wave of social networks may not be as generous to outside content providers. Instagram and Vine and Snapchat and WhatsApp and Kik do not replace Facebook and Twitter in terms of functionality, but that doesn't matter — they draw from the same pool of available attention. Facebook stole users' attention from MySpace by being a better MySpace, then it grew into something more — the new wave of apps (and yes, they're mostly apps) is stealing attention away from Facebook by each being something less

PageLever also says LinkedIn drives more referral traffic to Facebook Pages than Google and Bing combined

Readers of some of the top U.S. news sites are more engaged when they go directly to the website rather than through Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center released on Monday. The research found that users who come directly to a news site spend about three times as long per visit, or almost five minutes on average. Those who find the news by searching or through Facebook spend about two minutes.Direct visitors also view about five times as many pages per month as those coming through Facebook referrals or through search engines such as Google Inc.

yet the research shows that those readers who come to an article or video through Facebook are younger and more fickle in their loyalties.

"Even sites such as digital native BuzzFeed and National Public Radio's npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly."

Twitter and Facebook usually aren’t the last click before an ecommerce buy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t inspire or influence the purchase. Yet IBM’s Black Friday report says Twitter delivered 0 percent of referral traffic and Facebook sent just 0.68 percent. To lure advertisers and ecommerce integrations, they have to show its not Google driving every sale.

there’s a flaw in the “app for everything” ideology: now every single website these days wants to be an app. This is a bad because… Not everything needs to be an app If every site has an app, app stores will just end up like worse versions of the Internet (poor discovery, gatekeepers, etc.) Apps are high-friction (require more bandwidth, passwords, etc)

a new infographic reveals social commerce sales are expected to bring in $30 billion each year by 2015, with half of web sales to occur through social media.

Facebook drives 26% of referral traffic to business websites and those numbers are only expected to increase. About 20% of shoppers already prefer buying products through a brand’s Facebook page compared to its website.

. Nearly 10 million registered small businesses have a Facebook presence, and 89% of agencies use the social network to advertise for their business clients.

Share breaking news updates: Lavrusik and Hershkowitz said posts that included the terms “breaking” or “breaking news” saw engagement 57 percent higher than non-breaking news posts

Use a conversational tone and include analysis: Posts with a personal tone or clever language saw engagement of 120 percent above the average, and posts with analysis received 20 percent more referral clicks.

Start conversations by asking questions and responding: Posts with prompts for conversation of questions saw engagement 70 percent above the average

The keywords that visitors searched are usually captured in the case of search engine referrals. This is true for both organic and paid search. If the a visitor is signed in to a Google account, however, Keyword will have the value “(not provided)”.