Actionable Marketing Advice

Social Sharing Is About Scale Not Virality

How big is social sharing? Very big!

ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest collaborate to release the first study on social sharing. The study focuses on ShareThis’ database of sharing activity for it’s widget in March 2011 and includes a detailed analysis of more than 7 billion sharing signals across all major sharing channels, specifically looking at the sharing patterns of more than 300 million monthly users across the top 1,000 publisher websites of ShareThis. The analysis is based by the proportion of people who share via the different options on the widget.

Sharing is big, no surprise

Social sharing now produces an estimated 10 percent of all Internet traffic and 31 percent of referral traffic to sites from search and social. Search is around twice as big.

Facebook dominates as channel used to share

There are two sets of numbers here, this is because some content is shared and is never clicked on. Of the non-clicked, Facebook makes up 56 percent of total shared content (up from 45 percent in August, 2010), followed by email at 15 percent (down from 34 percent) and Twitter at 8 percent (which is interestingly down from 12 percent). In terms of clicked links and referral traffic, Facebook accounts for 38 percent email and Twitter are both second with 17 percent each.

Sharing is for scale, not virality

  • The data suggests that sharing is less viral than you may think with only 4.9 clicks per shared link. Links are less likely clicked outside of the users’ immediate network so think about large groups of people
  • 80% of people only share one category of content (business, politics, entertainment etc), this suggests people are influential on limited topics that are important enough to them

It’s a really interesting study given it’s size and also how hugely important motivating and harnessing social sharing is crucial to modern marketing, with that in mind our advice is is simply this:

  • It’s not about the tools – though tools like ShareThis, AddThis and the big enterprise software Gigya are all extremely important for success, so make sure they’re contained on web pages and emails and then focus on content
  • The content has to be great – there is no such thing as a “great viral”, viral is the effect of brilliant content – entertaining, valuable, insightful or newsworthy
  • Solve problems – buyers (B2C and B2B) are doing more research than ever online – recognise their needs over your need to ‘go viral’, help them make decisions relating to your product
  • Entertain – we all enjoy a laugh now and then, think about inspiring, educating and entertaining where you can
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  • http://www.smartinsights.com/about-dave-chaffey/ Dave Chaffey

    Interesting data Dan – I have seen similar reports from AddThis which we use for sharing on the channel shared by, but this is new in that it shows how shares contribute to site visits – 31% is higher than I’d expect and 10% of all traffic is amazing – have to wait to see the full report to understand how it can be this high.

    Although you say Facebook is highest, I think there’s a different story which is how important social bookmarking and email are for sharing > 50% overall – these are often neglected these days on sites as everyone chases the Likes, Follows and +1s.

  • http://benacheson.com Ben Acheson

    Social signals are also becoming increasingly important in SEO.

  • http://netvani.com Anne Patrick

    Wow! Your really had a great discussion here, Danyl. What you emphasized here are very important information for us, as bloggers and marketers. It is important that we share ideas which are helpful and with quality. Thanks for posting.

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