The study analyzed over 7 billion instances of social sharing activity from 300 million users across the top 1,000 websites in March 2011. It found that Facebook accounted for 56% of all shared content and 38% of clicks on shared content, while Twitter generated 11% of shared content and the highest click through rate. Although sharing content widely is less common than initial sharing between connected individuals, sharing represents a major source of web traffic and referral traffic to websites from search engines and social media. The researchers hope to help brands leverage understanding of sharing behavior to better enable sharing and integrate it into user experiences.

1. When it Comes to Social Sharing, Facebook
Dominates but Twitter Gets the Clicks
Posted by Sheila Shayon on June 9, 2011 05:00 PM
http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2011/06/09/Facebook-Dominates-Social-
Sharing.aspx
When it comes to determining the ROI of social marketing, brands are more concerned about
engagement, a big part of which is what gets shared, than the number of followers they've
accrued on the social web.
That prompted ShareThis (whose button enables one-click sharing), Starcom MediaVest
Group and Rubinson Partners to look at how and why people share online, in a research
project they’re calling “the most comprehensive study of online social sharing to date.”
Among their findings, sharing now produces an estimated 10% of all web traffic and 31% of
referral traffic to sites from search engines and social networks.
The study parsed the ShareThis database of activity for the month of March 2011, in a
granular analysis of over 7 billion "sharing signals" of 300 million plus monthly unique users
across the top 1,000 publisher websites with ShareThis functionality.
Facebook accounted for 56% of all shared content and 38% of all shared content clicked
through. Email accounted for 17% of clicked-on shared content in March, while Twitter
generated 11%.
As Adotas notes, links shared on Twitter were the most clicked (4.8 times each), which is
also the average number of clicks based on all shared-to sites via ShareThis (e.g., blogs and
bookmarking tools). Links shared on Facebook garnered a not-shabby 4.3 average while links
shared through email earned 1.7 clicks on average.
Sharing is less viral than one might think. “Links are much less likely to be clicked beyond
the initial set of people they are shared with. In other words, if you share a link directly with
me and I know you, I will probably click on it. But if I then pass that link along to people
once or twice removed from you, the chances they will click on the link falls dramatically,”
according to TechCrunch.

2. “Sharing is core to what we do at ShareThis and we’ve always believed that it is one of the
most important behaviors online, one that has the potential to power the larger Internet
economy,” commented Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis, about the research.
According to Jeff Flemings, SMG’s SVP/Human Experience Centers, “This joint research
project with ShareThis helps us understand people’s sharing behavior in unprecedented depth
and granularity. We will use this understanding to help brands enable sharing behavior and
integrate it into human experiences.”
Overall takeaways, none too surprising, for the researchers included that:
• Sharing is bigger than fans, friends and followers
• Sharing is about scale, not virality
• Everyone who shares is an influencer if the subject is important to him or her
• Sharing is about moments of opportunity and relevance.
And thus the earliest learnings of socialization, garnered on the playground, have made their
way to the largest classroom in the world, as their digital equivalents are emerging.