Forget Google+. Pinterest is the hot new social network right now. Numerous reports agree that unique visitors to Pinterest are skyrocketing, and that Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.
Could Pinterest be a legitimate rival to the likes of Facebook and Twitter? Perhaps, but the online pinboard service still has a ways to go.
In January, Pinterest accounted for 3.6 percent of referral traffic – up from 2.5 percent in December and a paltry .17 percent of traffic in July – making Pinterest nearly even with Twitter as a traffic driver, according to Shareaholic. That was more than YouTube (1.05 percent), Reddit (0.83 percent), Google+ (0.22 percent) LinkedIn (0.20 percent), and MySpace (0.01 percent) combined.
Meanwhile, Facebook dominated, accounting for 26.4 percent of referral traffic. Though Google+ referral traffic dropped, Google’s other products, including News, Images, and Gmail, continued to be a top referral source, noted Shareaholic, which aggregates data from more than 200,000 publishers and 260 million unique visitors per month.
Experian Hitwise, on the other hand, showed Pinterest trailing social networking giants Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Yahoo on referral traffic, at least as of Nov. 26.
We’ve already seen reports from comScore and Hitwise that have documented Pinterest’s huge growth spurt, amazingly while the site remains invitation only. Compete also agrees with the assessment, and notes that unique visitors to Pinterest increased 329 percent (to 7.21 million) between September and December last year.
The below infographic, “Is Pinterest the Next Social Commerce Game Changer?” comes courtesy of Monetate. As Monetate’s infographic points out, search remains the biggest traffic driver (at 29 percent in December), but retailers are increasingly exploring social media websites.
Also, here are “7 Creative Ways Your Brand Can Use Pinterest”.