• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 4, 2013

Nearly a quarter (23%) of external traffic to news sites comes from social networks, with Facebook driving 58% of social referrals. The finding comes from SimpleReach, which makes software powering sharing activing across a network of 5,000 sites ranging from personal blogs to large outlets like Forbes.com, People.com, and FoxSports.com.

In a recent blog post, the company said Facebook’s share of social traffic was more than twice the share for Twitter (26%), with StumbleUpon a distant third, at 6.6%. Given that Facebook’s user base is four times that of Twitter (1.1 billion monthly active users versus 200 million) that’s not too surprising.

SimpleReach also found articles tend to “trend” longer on Facebook than Twitter. With the former, the average half-life of an article is 7.8 hours compared to 4.5 on Twitter. That means a piece of content has 73% more peak visibility on Facebook. “This makes sense, considering Facebook‘s News Feed algorithm promotes the most social content whereas Twitter relies solely on their users to keep content alive,” stated the post.

The company also found most social traffic comes from a small share of articles—the top 1% of stories drove 67% of total referrals across the SimpleReach network—and that lifestyle content is the most social material, accounting for 52% of social referrals.