ShareThis once again released new sharing statistics for its ubiquitous plugin and I thought I would continue my tradition of offering some comments about the latest trends.
The numbers this time are not as detailed as earlier but there are some interesting insights from this data. Compared to last year, Email sharing is down by more than 10% while Facebook sharing is up by 12%. Twitter, which barely made the list last year, is the #3 sharing platform with nearly 6%. Last year I made the (not so bold) prediction that Twitter would increase and Email sharing would fall. The continuing rise of Facebook sharing shows just how powerful Facebook has become as a medium for distributing content. I also believed that StumbleUpon would become more important, but these figures are regrettably not available. Nevertheless, it is apparent that Twitter and Facebook are establishing themselves as the leaders of the pack.
So what does this mean for content publishers? It is very tempting to offer readers a large number of options to share content but in the end, perhaps less is more. From a usability and conversion perspective, it is usually better to limit the choices in order to drive traffic toward a conversion goal. With Twitter, Facebook and Email sharing (based on these statistics), a content publisher has over 85% of the sharing mediums covered. Does it make any sense to bother with the remaining 15%?
The rest of the blog post over at Sharethis.com is equally interesting. I encourage you to read it as it reveals some interesting data about how users engage with the content once it is shared. User engagement (measured as pages/visit) of visitors coming to a site via a shared url on Twitter, for example, significantly underperforms Facebook and Email in this important metric. As the post correctly points out, this makes a lot of sense because articles or other links shared by your close friends are more likely to be clicked and appreciated than the “drive-by” nature of the links on micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.
