According to ShareThis, makers of sharing buttons for publishers, the most popular means of sharing online content is via email– more than Facebook, more than Twitter, more than any other social media.
From ShareThis December 16, 2009 press release:
ShareThis data shows that people still prefer to share content via email and that recipients are more engaged when receiving shares through email. Social channels such as Twitter have high click-through rates, but have relatively low amounts of shares and those who do click through spend very little time with the actual content:
- 46% of users share content via email compared to 33.32 percent via Facebook, 14.47 percent via other channels and only 5.82 percent via Twitter;
- Of content shared, 40.1 percent of clicks come from shared articles on Twitter, 35.2 percent of clicks come from email and other social channels, and 24.6 percent of clicks come from Facebook;
- However, once they have clicked through, Twitter has a lower level of engagement at 1.66 page views per unique click, with email maintaining the highest engagement at 2.95 page views, followed by Facebook with 2.76 page views.
ShareThis gets more than 200 million monthly unique visitors (comScore) over more than 125,000 websites in its network.
Hmm… maybe I’m on to something using video email.
