When it comes to sharing links, Facebook and Twitter immediately come to mind as the social networks of choice. Dan Zarrella, HubSpot social media scientist, recently conducted a study of link sharing and SERP (search engine results page) correlation on the top three social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — to determine which platform improves search engine results the most. Surprise, it’s LinkedIn!

This is important because receiving more shares creates a snowball effect. Each time your content is seen and shared, you receive an inbound link. The more links your article has, the higher the authority rank it is given by search engines. This results in higher search engine placement and, along with it, more site traffic.

According to an article on the SEOmoz blog, Zarrella compiled a database of 25,000+ URLs that had been shared at least once on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The URLs were all at least one month old and had a minimum of one incoming link. The study found that, while Facebook and Twitter users share the most links to content, the number of links directed at that content is higher per share via LinkedIn.

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There was a positive correlation between the number of times a URL
was tweeted and the number of incoming links it had pointing to it.

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A look at Facebook yielded almost exactly the same result: Link
popularity on Facebook is related to inbound link popularity for URLs.

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Fewer links are shared on LinkedIn than on Twitter and Facebook,
but there’s a much higher positive correlation of shares to inbound links.

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