Statcounter’s rankings show that only in the U.S. StumbleUpon took the lead, with just over 43 percent, while Facebook had 38 percent of the market for driving social media traffic domestically. To clarify, this measures sending people to social sites, not the number of visitors to social sites.
More importantly, Facebook still ranks number one by a long shot if you look at Statcounter’s global figures, with something like 60 percent of the market compared to 20 percent for StumbleUpon.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. statistic has made StumbleUpon’s Chief Executive Officer Garrett Camp feel like thumping his chest via Twitter, but the trickle of media reprots on his Tweet have been, well confusing.
To arrive at measurements of social media traffic, Statcounter tracks an average of 15 billion page views a month going to more than three million websites. Some have questioned whether that constitues an adequate sample, but the answer to that queston requires knowing how Statcounter obtains these page views to track. If they’re obtained randomly, then fine, but if they’re just somehow tied to Statcounter’s clientele, then that data doesn’t mean as much.
Readers, what do you make of this data? What can Facebook do to improve its share of social media traffic in the U.S.?
Source: All Facebook
Monday, January 3, 2011