Just over a month ago, Facebook introduced the new Like and Share buttons, which have been rolling out slowly (though perhaps not as slowly as some Facebook updates).

Facebook said it had seen a “favorable increase” in likes and shares in testing the new design. Shareaholic is sharing some findings, suggesting, “they were right”.

In its new Facebook Referrals Report, it finds that in the last month, Facebook’s share of visits jumped 47.44%. The report is based on 13 months of data collected from over 200,000 publishers who reach over 250 million unique monthly visitors.

“Although Shareaholic does not offer the new FB buttons among our own share buttons, we still track inbound traffic on sites that use any of our other offerings (analytics and related content). Some of our publishers have adopted the new Like and Share buttons from Facebook and are obviously reaping the benefits,” says Shareaholic’s Danny Wong. “Others that use our share buttons still see gains in Facebook referral traffic.”

The report’s’ other main finding is that Facebook’s share of visits jumped 169.88% in the past year.

Clearly, based on this graph, Facebook referrals were climbing ahead of the new buttons, but look at that spike for November. If these buttons really are making a significant difference, that’s got to be good news for publishers, especially if it’s getting harder to be found in the news feed itself, thanks to Facebook’s version of the Panda update.

Image: Shareaholic