By Lani Rosales for AGBeat

Visual social media has been the big hit of 2012, with visual bookmarking site Pinterest leading the way alongside photo sharing tool Instagram. New data from Shareaholic reveals that referral traffic from Pinterest still surpasses Twitter, as it has for months, and now surpasses StumbleUpon, Bing and Google referral traffic (note: Shareaholic considers Google referral traffic to be referrals that don’t come through AdWords or organic search, nor through Google+, but through Google sites like Google Groups).

This study echoes recent data from Monetate, which noted that while Facebook has the highest user counts, Pinterest has skyrocketed from 0.68 percent of referral traffic in the first quarter of 2011 to 26 percent in the first quarter of 2012, as Facebook has dropped from 88 percent of e-commerce referrals to 59 percent in the same period.

The real surprise
Shareaholic has long reported that Pinterest surpasses Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined when it comes to referral traffic, and now reports that Pinterest’s referral traffic jumped from 0.85 percent in January to 1.19 percent in June. Twitter referral traffic rose from 0.82 percent in February to 0.92 percent in June, with the big surprise being Pinterest beating StumbleUpon’s referral traffic, because StumbleUpon has long boasted dramatic traffic.

The study is based on Shareaholic’s network of more than 200,000 publishers, which reaches more than 270 million people monthly and is reinforcement that Pinterest should be taken seriously by anyone working on their SEO. While the pitfalls of Pinterest include copyright infringement and scams among others, the benefits are widely underutilized by brands, and are being discovered by consumers internationally.

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