n news that should come as little surprise to anyone who runs any sort of website, a new report has found that referral traffic from both Facebook and X has continued to decline over the past year, with social media traffic now accounting for much smaller chunks of your overall visitor numbers.

According to Similarweb data, and further analysis by Axios, Facebook referrals to news websites have shrunk by about 80% since September 2020. And X traffic has shrunk about 60% in the same period. And it's getting more pronounced of late as both platforms look to lean into shifting user behaviors, like short-form video, to maximize engagement.

Which, again, is no surprise.

And views of Facebook posts that have links have plummeted by nearly 50 percent over the last two years, Meta's own data show.
That, in turn, partly explains why: Users have repeatedly told Meta that they don't want those debates dominating their experience.

Although there are other aspects involved, it remains the biggest change from the old, namely the rise of short-form video content, which together sees views of over 200 billion per day on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta has played to the strength of exploiting AI-driven content recommendations by feeding into it, based on TikTok's idea, allowing each user to show the most interesting content to themselves based on interests rather than limiting the types of views they may see to friends and Pages each user handpicked to follow in each individual app.

This has been a sea change for social media broadly and one that could potentially also change the definition of what "social" media will become. While the past few years have seen decreasing numbers posting personal updates on social apps but consuming an increasing number of pieces, really this would make the social platforms entertainment media and not a social app where the elements are now coming across in merging into the messaging tool instead.

But in any case, the result is that fewer people are clicking on links, and Meta's apps are showing fewer link posts, preferring to dump into video instead.

On X, it's slightly different, though the emphasis ends up being largely the same.

X owner Elon Musk has observed that X is actually incentivizing users to make direct postings within the app, so links now get less reach than they once did, and the X algorithm is also more strongly trending video, in keeping with the above usage trends.

Link posts, overall, are getting far less exposure, which ultimately means fewer clicks.

It all makes sense in logic and fits with broader trends and shifts in usage. Still, it will change your social posting strategy and could even make you rethink how best you can engage audiences within each app.
Some media publishers have now switched to posting a description of an article in an image post, then adding a link to the actual post in the first comment. We tried this at SMT, and our reach on Facebook did indeed go up initially as a result, but link clicks saw no significant impact and reach also normalized after a week or so. This can be a consideration and may drive higher engagement, but we did not feel anything was different from this (and a bit of more playing around as you are unable to pre-schedule comments).

Other publishers now look to post greater more visual elements such as carousels and videos to explain new posts, in order to improve the engagement of the brand, and drive more interest.

Basically, with referral traffic declining, it may be time to reassess what, specifically, social media is really doing for your branding and engagement efforts, and if using the medium in some other way might be beneficial by driving more subscribers, sign-ups, etc.

There is no absolute answer to this. But the data on traffic falls are obvious, and these deserve to be part of your planning. Perhaps there are other channels through which you can drive traffic, such as ways beyond posting links. But the statistics here point to the reality that you will not enjoy the same referral figures that you used to.