A recent article in Forbes discussed how StumbleUpon has overtaken Facebook as the top source for social media traffic in the U.S. This comes from a analytics site Statcounter which also stated that StumbleUpon accounts for roughly 43% of the U.S. social media traffic, while Facebook accounts for about 38% as of January 1st.
The article also stated that StumbleUpon founder and chief executive Garrett Camp announced the news on his Twitter account earlier.
Statcounter tracks 15 billion page views on the Web per month on more than three million websites. Among social media sites, it tracks the topn: StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Myspace and Digg. Just last year during the same period, StumbleUpon made up 30% of the traffic, while Facebook had 48%. But, as a recent Atlantic article reported, the growth in online sharing with StumbleUpon outpaced Facebook in 2010.
You can see a larger version of the graph here.
What’s interesting is how StumbleUpon’s comparatively smaller user base — 13 million compared to Facebook’s 500 million — generates more traffic than Facebook’s. It’s important to note, however, that StumbleUpon may generate a lot of traffic for other websites, but that does not necessarily mean it gets a lot of traffic for its own. In fact, Facebook recently beat Google as most visited website worldwide.
So what does this mean for businesses struggling to figure out how to engage with their customers on social channels? If they haven’t already, businesses should certainly not abandon their other social channels and strategies but should look to add StumbleUpon to the mix. Add StumbleUpon sharing options to content and websites and also look to use the services other features.
