Social sharing services: a tool to show importance by market

Facebook features heavily - but Twitter a surprise?

Value/Importance: [rating=3]

Recommended tool: Add This Services

Important if you value sharing in different global markets

We thought it would be useful to share this free tool available from Add This, the company behind one of the webs most popular sharing bar. Remember that companies such as Add This (and ShareThis whom we've mentioned before) track a lot of data surrounding the use of their social sharing tools. The service that we're referencing here enables you to look at the usage of share services by country.

Some key observations

• Facebook dominates, as you would expect - but not necessarily for B2B
• Twitter is second and surprisingly important in the UK in particular - companies who just share via Facebook or Google+ only are missing out
• Email - despite social sharing "forward to a friend or colleague" is still popular and you can imagine that this option is often used when  recommending services or websites
• Print - this is surprisingly popular showing the value of including this as an option and making sure you can have good quality sharing features

Marketing implications

The importance behind these pieces of insights is that it reminds us to keeping asking the questions, the put the users first and not assume too much.

This research could be really useful if you are deciding on which sharing services to use or want to justify it to colleagues - the data is robust. The pretty significant variations by country will be extremely useful if you work across several markets.