Pinterest drives more traffic than Twitter

Want to drive traffic to your site? Forget Twitter (Okay maybe don’t forget it entirely) and get pinning.

That’s right, Pinterest — a two-year old social network with 11-million users — drives more traffic to websites than Twitter — a five year-old network with well over 100-million active users.

According to the latest stats from Shareaholic, a third-party social measurement tool, Pinterest not only beat out Twitter, but also referred Google traffic and organic Bing searches.

Shareaholic claims its findings are “based on aggregated data from more than 200 000 publishers that reach more than 270-million unique monthly visitors each month”.

But what’s behind Pinterest’s sudden climb up the referer charts?

According to Shareaholic, “Pinterest’s digital collage wonderland is essentially a photo-sharing/link-sharing service that is naturally inclined to drive referral traffic”.

That doesn’t entirely explain why it should outpace Twitter so rapidly though, given that the latter is also a share heavy platform.

Twitter also isn’t the only big name Pinterest’s had to overtake to get to the suddenly elevated referer position it finds itself in.

In January, Shareaholic revealed that Pinterest outpaced Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined for share of referral traffic.

Shareaholic’s other findings suggest that the Google+ naysayers might actually be onto something and held more bad news for the formerly all-powerful MySpace:

• Although Google referral traffic (not search) grew by 0.23% from January to February, Pinterest still beats it out by 0.14%.
• Don’t credit Google Plus with Google’s referral traffic growth, though. Referral traffic from Google Plus held steady at .05% of all traffic from January to February. For context, that’s the same percentage of traffic referred by Yahoo Answers.
• It’s always interesting to check up on the once-popular MySpace — In February it referred .0007% of all traffic, down from .001% in January.
• Organic search dominated, delivering more than 50% of the overall traffic. Google was the most popular search engine, followed by Yahoo and then Bing.

You don’t have to be the shiny new social networking darling to drive traffic though. Social stalwart Stumbleupon continued to dominate as a traffic drive — sending more traffic than Pinterest, Twitter or Google referrals.

Pinterest’s rapid climb is undeniable. Only time will tell, however, whether it’s found the golden ticket or is just the flavour of the month.