• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, April 7, 2014

According to the first edition of Shareaholic’s ”Social Referrals That Matter” Report, a look at the average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate for visitors referred to sites from each of the top 8 social media platforms, YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. Danny Wong writes that the findings are represented as average values over the last 6 months for their respective categories.

Six noteworthy findings says the report:

YouTube is the undisputed champion, driving the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate, the highest pages per visit, and the longest visit duration.  Why are visitors from YouTube are so engaged, says the report, because video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions which complement the audio+visual content they just consumed. Viewers are used to spending minutes or hours educating and entertaining themselves with awesome video, and may have fewer qualms about taking extra time to discover more great content post-click.

Though Google+ and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors. Google+ users, on average, find themselves spending more than 3 minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles, while LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click. Now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business, suggests the report.

A referral from Twitter is as good as a referral from Facebook in terms of bounce rate, pages per visit and time on site, notes the report. In 4th place, Twitter and Facebook are tied. Both types of visitors bounce the same, while Twitter wins the pages per visit category, and Facebook users tend to spend more time on a site post-click than Twitter users do.

Pinterest isn’t the social media golden child we all play it up to be, observes wong. Pinners bounce as often as FB users and Tweeps do, but view fewer pages per visit, and spend considerably less time on site than almost all of its counterparts, with the exception of StumbleUpon.

Reddit users are the most fickle. Redditors are the most likely to abandon sites — on average, 70.16% bounce. For marketers, Reddit is a tough nut to crack, opines the report. Its uber-loyal users are increasingly selective about the content that gets upvoted and are eager to downvote things they disagree with.

StumbleUpon drives the least engaged referrals. Post-click, users view a meager 1.5 pages per visit and spend 54.09 seconds on site. It would appear that StumbleUpon’s click-heavy focus makes users trigger happy. Users stumble onto the next thing rather than immerse themselves in the webpage SU recommends, concludes the report.

For more from Shareaholic and access to 6 month charts, please visit here.