According to a report by SocialTwist, email is the preferred medium of social sharing for users. This is not that surprising as most people who use social tools are techies, not mainstream users. The mainstream will still copy and paste a URL into the body of their email to share!
This also means that most users still prefer to share to one person as opposed to many at the same time, which is what social networks do.
What I find interesting is that bookmarks are becoming a less relevant form of sharing. Again the people who bookmark are not mainstream users but I know there’s still a lot of bookmarking being done by power users who have the Digg and Delicious toolbar installed in their browsers and the report is not taking them into account.
KEY FINDINGS
- The top channels of sharing include, email, instant messenger, social networking sites
- Despite the social media revolution – traditional forms of networking like email and instant messaging continue to be the most popular mediums of sharing content across the Internet. Nearly 60 percent of overall sharing happens over emails.
- Since it opened itself to all age groups in September 2006, Facebook has displaced MySpace as the most popular social networking site especially when it comes to sharing content online.
- It is clear that Twitter is perceived to be a news broadcast platform and not a "sharing" platform. It enjoys only 5% of "shared information" traffic among popular social platforms.
- Bookmarks are rapidly losing their significance in the social media space. Only 2% of shares happen over Bookmarking sites.
- When it comes to email services, Yahoo Mail is still the most preferred, followed by MSN. Gmail is way behind.
- Google’s services like Google Bookmarking, Google Talk, Gmail, and Blogger have failed to replicate the brand’s search engine success online, especially when it comes to ‘shared information.’
- LinkedIn, as a networking site, ranks the lowest when it comes to social media sharing.