Facebook and Pinterest are the clear standouts when it comes to referral traffic from social networks. While Facebook leads the pack, accounting for more than 10 percent of traffic to publishers in September, Pinterest holds second place, driving more traffic than Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit combined. According to data from social plugin service Shareaholic, collected from 200,000 publishers, Pinterest drove 3.68 percent of traffic to publishers in September, about three times as much as third-ranked Twitter.

“Pinterest’s share of overall visits increased by 66 percent year-over-year, more than any other social network,” reports Mashable. “Pinterest now drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.”

Most of the social networks showed year-over-year increases, except for Reddit and StumbleUpon, which declined 35 percent and 27.5 percent, respectively.

Shareaholic’s “Social Media Traffic Report” tracked eight of the most popular social media platforms over 13 months. Among the key findings:

• Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are dominating. These three social media power players collectively accounted for 15.22 percent of overall traffic last month. Given their community and share-friendly nature, it’s no surprise that they top the list in traffic referrals and have grown more than 54 percent each in share of overall visits.
• YouTube and LinkedIn are gaining share. Although YouTube and LinkedIn aren’t topping the leaderboard (yet), they’re growing fast. Their share of overall traffic to publishers increased 52.86 percent and 34.51 percent respectively. Everyone loves YouTube (and probably spends more time on it than they should). That’s simple. LinkedIn’s growth can partly be attributed to the popularity of the Influencers program and its disruptive media model.
• Google+ isn’t yet competitive. Although Google+ referred a fair number of visits to online publishers last month (0.04 percent is a substantial number when we’re looking at a data set of hundreds of millions of visits), it is hardly a leading referral source. Google+ is consistently dwarfed by the competing social media sites.