Shareaholic has a new report out called “Social Referrals That Matter,” which looks at the average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rates for visitors to its network of sites from the top 8 social media platforms.

The report is based on data from over 200,000 sites, reaching over 250 million unique monthly visitors over a span of six months (September 2013 – February 2014). Specifically, it looks at data from YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, reddit, and StumbleUpon.

The study found that YouTube beats all others for both average time on site and average pages per visit. Interestingly. Bounce rate is lower than all others as well.

Google+ comes in second for post-click engagement, with pretty good numbers in all three categories. Interestingly, Facebook is all the way down at number 5.

Shareaholic’s Danny Wong writes, “Why are visitors from YouTube so engaged? …because video itself is so engaging and viewers are likely to maintain a similar level of engagement with related content. Therefore, video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions which complement the audio+visual content they just consumed. Another reason YouTube takes home the crown is because viewers are simply used to spending minutes — perhaps, hours — educating and entertaining themselves with awesome video and may have fewer qualms about taking extra time to discover more great content post-click.”

“Although Google+ and LinkedIn drive the fewest social referrals, they bring in some of the best visitors. Google+ users, on average, find themselves spending north of 3 minutes diving into things shared by connections in their circles,” he adds. “They also visit 2.45 pages during each visit, and bounce only 50.63% of the time. LinkedIn users generally spend 2 minutes and 13 seconds on each link they click, viewing 2.23 pages with each visit and bouncing 51.28% of the time. Although many sites see minimal traffic from both Google+ and LinkedIn, now may be the time to invest in building communities within those networks if engagement really matters to your business.”

Well, we certainly know businesses are growing increasingly frustrated with a certain other social network that has been decrasing the reach of their posts. In fact, one brand just announced that they’re so fed up with Facebook’s practices, they’re leaving the network entirely.

It also just so happens that YouTube just released a new Creator playbook for brands.

Both of these things make Shareaholic’s report all the more timely.

Image via Shareaholic