If you own a business or service, it is imperative to get on the social media “bandwagon”. With the high number of users on the Internet, using social media and posting will instantly get advertising out to users. There are many social media sites to choose from, but stats released recently reveal which sites are best and which sites to avoid.

Shareaholic, a leader of content discovery and sharing, came out with new stats about the most popular social media sites on the Internet. A lot of what they reveal was much of the same with the same big sites increasing in size and user base. But on the other side, there were a few unexpected sites that are not moving up.

The top three Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter are at their normal spots at the top. In this case, the best get even better. These three social media giants bring in large numbers of referrals (10.37%, 3.68% and 1.17% respectively) to online publishers last month. Their respective share of referrals traffic visits increased to 58.81%, 66.52% and 54.12% over the last year.

And on the other end of the scale, a few big sites went down on their referral power. The social sharing sites StumbleUpon and Reddit decreased. StumbleUpon referrals declined 27.47%, while Reddit experienced a 35.16% drop. A couple of huge sites dropped with YouTube and LinkedIn, which saw their share of referrals grow 52.86% and 34.51%. And struggling to pick up the pace is Google+.

The conclusion from these numbers is that advertisers should continue to plug away at the big social media sites like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. But with the drop of referrals from sites like Youtube and Reddit, is it worth using those sites still? Yes, you are always looking for specific markets and audiences, so despite the numbers, those sites can still help you.

You may have the case that one social media site, popular or not, may give you a higher number of referrals than others. The key to using social media is of course to get referrals but more important is to get the optimum audience. So work the big three but also do your due diligence and use as many sites as you can.

Image credit: Randy Barnes on Flickr