While Facebook is the king of web traffic, Pinterest is 3 times stronger than Twitter at referral traffic

Statista – When it comes to referral traffic from social networks, it is no surprise that Facebook is the undisputed no. 1. According to Shareaholics, 10% of the traffic on websites from 200,000 publishers comes from the world’s largest social network.

Behind Facebook though, there are a couple of surprises.

Firstly, it may be considered a surprise that Pinterest beats Twitter for the no.2 spot, given the key role that Twitter allegedly plays in the spreading of online news.

What’s really astonishing though is the apparent irrelevance of Google+ as a traffic source for online publishers. According to Shareaholics, Google+ is the source of no more than 0.04 percent of publishers’ website traffic.

Pinterest is probably pulling away from Twitter and the rest of the pack because it of the graphical and attractive images, sorted by your interest and appeal to mobile users. People can scan it quickly for interesting images and then click to the story. Twitter is text driven with limited visual content and takes two steps to get to the story.