Report: Facebook referrals up 169 percent over the past year

While Facebook page admins may be unhappy that the site has decreased organic reach, those eyeballs are going somewhere. A new report by Shareaholic shows that referral traffic from Facebook to websites has increased 169.88 percent over the past year and 47.44 percent in the past month.

The stats ring true as Facebook tries to make the News Feed more “newsy,” showing that publishers are getting better about pushing relevant content out. Shareaholic’s Danny Wong also points to more visually striking like and share buttons as the reason why Facebook is a major referral source among the 200,000+ publishers in the report (who reach more than 250 million unique monthly visitors).

Wong notes that among the publishers in the study, Facebook referred 17.41