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By on February 17, 2010

Facebook Corners 44% of Social Sharing

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TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld talked to sharing-widget producer Gigya recently to find out what site people tended to share content on the most. Gigya’s widget power social sharing from sites such as ABC.com, Reuters and Answers.com (and 5000 more). When people shared content, where did they tend to post it? Facebook was the #1 choice for 44% of content sharing.

(Sub-lesson of this article: lying with statistics. Can you guess what share the other three got from the chart?)

Gigya also looked at sign-in data for these sites—for example, whether users signed in via Gmail/Google, Yahoo or Facebook Connect to interact with or share content. For some types of sites, they were nearly equal—but not others. News sites saw 31% Facebook sign ins, 30% Google/Gmail sign ins and 25% Yahoo sign ins (Twitter saw 11% and AOL 3%). But for entertainment sites, Facebook was the far more popular choice at 52%, with Google (17%), Yahoo (12%) and Twitter (11%) trailing far behind. (MySpace, 7%, and AOL, 1%, fared even worse.)

Facebook chat is also popular—more than half (56%) of all live chat events Gigya monitors were hosted on Facebook. Twitter was second with 28%, and Yahoo (9%) and MySpace (7%) eked in there.

So what were the overall share numbers for Facebook’s competitors in overall sharing? Twitter had 29%, Yahoo 18% and MySpace 9%. If you really study the tilted 3D graph, you can approximate it pretty well—but it looks a little more proportional even at a glance in the 2D graph, doesn’t it?

Upon seeing the data from Gigya, another sharing widget company volunteered its data. AddThis, used in 600,000 (smaller than Gigya’s, for the most part, since AddThis’s clients include Blogger users), shared the top ten services their users choose to share with. While Facebook was still tops, their lead wasn’t quite as decisive as in Gigya’s data.

Facebook: 33%
Email: 13%
Print:9%
Twitter: 9%
Favorites: 8%
Google: 6%
MySpace: 6%
Digg: 3%
Live: 3%
Delicious: 3%

What do you think? Is Facebook the way you prefer to share things online?


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13 comments on “Facebook Corners 44% of Social Sharing”

  1. Justin Thorp Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 1:53 pm

    Jordan, thanks so much for the mention of AddThis. If you’re ever interested in finding the latest greatest of those AddThis stats, you can find them at the AddThis Service Directory (http://addthis.com/services). We refresh the data daily to show where things are based on the last 30 days. It shows all of the over 230 social services and tools that we’ve integrated with.

    As you mentioned, that data is the sharing that comes from the well over 600,000 websites that the AddThis platform has been integrated with. Here’s a short list of some of those. – http://addthis.com/features#partners

    If you ever have any questions or wanna talk more about what we have going on, don’t hesitate to drop me a line – justin@clearspring.com

    -Justin, Community Manager of AddThis

  2. Paul Chaney Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 3:00 pm

    I tend to favor Twitter for sharing, but Friendfeed routes my tweets into Facebook, so it ends up there anyway.

  3. Css Creme Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 3:28 pm

    Well, i don’t found anything strange in fact that Facebook is on top on this list. I also preferably use them for social sharing.
    .-= Css Creme´s last blog ..Images Out of Bounds Photoshop Effects Tutorial =-.

  4. Kristen Tom Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 4:29 pm

    I prefer Facebook when sharing information online. It’s efficient and convenient since all of my friends, family, and co-workers have an account. I like Twitter, but it restricts you from doing things and you have to go to multiple websites to add a pic or video.

  5. Justin Thorp Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 4:38 pm

    If you’re a website publisher, I think the net net takeaway from these type of stats is that the Social Web is a pretty diverse landscape. You shouldn’t be betting the farm on just integrating with one service or another. You really need to use a platform which is going to allow you to be shared into every corner of the Social Web, otherwise you’re just leaving shares on the table and thus potential users.

  6. angela@tutu Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 8:43 pm

    That is a phenomenal number. However, I think facebook is becoming a fad and twitter is cutting into that number fairly deeply.

  7. ceviri Says:

    February 17th, 2010 at 9:44 pm

    I am suprised to see Myspace there.
    the 2010 winner is my website :)

  8. Luci Says:

    February 18th, 2010 at 4:04 am

    I’m not surprised by these results – although I do occasionally share things on twitter, I favour Facebook in general as do most of the people I’m friends with (although, a lot of them also aren’t on Twitter). Interesting that Myspace is still in the mix – how much has its’ share fallen since its heyday?
    .-= Luci´s last blog ..SEO Connections – SES London 2010 =-.

  9. Michelle Bauer Says:

    February 18th, 2010 at 10:20 am

    Well, I never doubted Facebook came out at the top as well. I usually spend more time socializing using Facebook. :)
    .-= Michelle Bauer´s last blog ..Planning a Family Cruise Vacation =-.

  10. Justin Thorp Says:

    February 18th, 2010 at 10:35 am

    Hey guys, we actually just updated our AddThis Service Directory with more data on how people share.
    http://addthis.com/services

  11. Twitter users are 4x more likely to share content than Facebook users Says:

    February 22nd, 2010 at 10:01 am

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  12. ingilizce ceviri Says:

    February 23rd, 2010 at 2:40 pm

    I don’t understand why Google doesn’t want people in the US to know about Orkut, their first social sharing on the web . It’s huge in Brazil and India. I see it on the Google apps page, but nobody ever talks about it.

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