Digiday+ Research: Nearly half of publishers report an increase in referral traffic from social

In fact, nearly half of publishers have seen an increase over the last year in the referral traffic they get from social media platforms. This is according to a Digiday+ Research survey of more than 50 publisher professionals conducted during the second quarter of this year.

Digiday’s survey found that nearly half of publishers are seeing an increase in referral traffic from social media platforms — which is certainly noteworthy in an industry that’s been working for a long time to figure out how to make social media work for them. Forty-seven percent of publisher pros said in Q2 this year that their companies have seen an increase in social referral traffic since January of last year.

For those publishers who have seen an increase in referral traffic from social media, Digiday’s survey found that Meta and TikTok are responsible for the biggest part of that lift. One-quarter of publisher pros said they’ve seen increases in referral traffic come from Facebook and Instagram — 14% said Facebook has driven most of the increase in social referral traffic over the last year and 11% said the same of Instagram. Eleven percent of publisher pros said TikTok has driven most of the increase in social referral traffic they’ve seen since January 2024.

LinkedIn gets an honorable mention, with 8% of publisher pros saying most of the increase in social referral traffic has come from the platform. Meanwhile, 3% of publishers said X, Reddit and Bluesky, respectively, are responsible for the biggest lift in traffic referrals from social media platforms.

The social platforms from which publishers have seen an increase in referral traffic over the last year tracks with the platforms they said are the source of the majority of their referral traffic from social, Digiday’s survey found — at least for the most part. Nearly two-thirds of publisher pros said in Q2 of this year that Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms account for the majority of their social referral traffic. Forty percent said the majority of their social referral traffic comes from Facebook, and 20% said it comes from Instagram.

However, LinkedIn came out ahead of TikTok in this category. Twenty percent of publisher pros told Digiday that the majority of their social referral traffic comes from LinkedIn. TikTok came fairly far behind that, with 8% of publisher pros saying the platform is responsible for the majority of their referral traffic from social media. Eight percent also said X drives the majority of their social referral traffic.

As the platform that arguably lends itself best to publishers’ content, it’s possible that publishers have already maxed out as far as how much traffic they can drive from LinkedIn — and have been fairly successful in doing so, which is why it ranks higher in this category. However, publishers (and everyone else for that matter) are still figuring out how best to use TikTok to drive traffic, and the experimentation on the platform could account for why a significant percentage of publishers have seen an increase in referral traffic from TikTok in the last year.