Shareaholic has a new report out looking at social media traffic referrals from eight social networks in the last quarter. Out of those eight, only two – Facebook and StumbleUpon – showed growth over the prior quarter in terms of driving referrals to websites. This is good news for publishers looking for StumbleUpon traffic, as its share had been on the decline in the previous quarter’s report.

To put this in perspective, Facebook is (obviously) always on top, and way ahead of the rest in these reports. Pinterest comes in second (though it has plateaued). It’s a distant second, but still well above the rest of the platforms. Twitter is third, and then StumbleUpon is fourth, ahead of reddit, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

StumbleUpon’s share in December was still down 42% compared to December 2013, and down 69% from December 2011.

“Over the past 37 months, StumbleUpon’s share of traffic sunk 69.41% (1.13 percentage points),” writes Shareaholic’s Danny Wong. “Formerly the 2nd largest driver of social traffic, StumbleUpon has dropped to 4th place. In December 2011, its share of traffic was 1.63% and last month it was 0.50%. According to the company, StumbleUpon has 30 million users. This means there remains plenty of opportunity for individual brands and publishers to capture tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of views if a single link they share goes viral.”

Based on the past quarter’s data, it looks like it’s headed in the right direction, which is likely from some new strategies the company is employing. We recently chatted with the company’s Director of Marketing, Anne Gherini about its email marketing practices, which are helping to drive engagement (and certainly traffic to featured pages).

The company is also using its own social media accounts to highlight content, which is no doubt helping.

The company recently launched a new content program for bloggers enabling them to have content highlighted, which may contribute to the referral increase.

One thing, however, which could be having a huge impact, is a change StumbleUpon made to the functionality of its button, which websites use on their content. Now, when a user uses the button to submit the content to StumbleUpon, they’re presented with additional stumbled content from the site and a button enabling them to stumble more from the site.

It’s likely a combination of all of these factors that led to StumbleUpon’s increase, which is one I expect to see continued in Shareaholic’s next quarterly report. We’ll see.

Images via Shareaholic, StumbleUpon