According to the people at addtoany, the volume of information being shared around the web through Facebook has increased dramatically over the past year. Specifically, Facebook now accounts for 24 percent of all items being shared in contrast to email which now accounts for 11.1 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter now accounts for 10.8 percent of all items shared. I reached out to the company to find out what sampling size the company has.
While Pat Diven of AddToAny couldn’t provide specific details, he said that their widget is accessed over 1.5 billion times per month. The other two leaders AddThis and Share This also have a large number of implementations around the web, providing for a significant sample size. Justin Thorp of AddThis, which is 20 times larger than AddToAny, told us that Facebook is also the largest sharing site through their platform, accounting for 23.5 percent of shares, almost identical to AddToAny’s statistics.
What’s clear is that Facebook continues to single handedly eat away from email as one of the primary communication channels. The platform is also now the largest for sharing information although Twitter appears to be taking a large volume away as they have a large percentage of the market of users who actively share. The next step for Facebook is to become one of the primary communication channels by improving their inbox.
The company has steadily improved the inbox product, however it is still significantly lacking. There’s no way to export messages and there is no email support. It’s also not easy to sort through a large number of messages. Regardless of all the downfalls, Facebook has become the most dominant sharing platform online and continues to grow daily. If Facebook can keep this up, the number of links passing through the site could potentially rival the number of links being crawled by Google.
Do you use Facebook as your primary sharing channel?
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"Do you use Facebook as your primary sharing channel?"
Well, I use Twitter, but then my Tweets are published on my FB status. Does it count ?
Interesting data though obviously it is biaised considering the source. Copy and paste to Outlook or MSN may remain the most common way to share content though it may not be counted. Is anyone aware of other data on this issue ?
Comment by Facebook User — July 21, 2009 @ 11:32 am
I'm assuming this does not include the old way of sharing, where the URL – and sometimes the entire contents – are pasted into email and sent out. Any research to track those numbers, hard as it must be? Is that now a dwindling and not-worth-counting-anymore form of sharing? Very curious.
Comment by Arunava Sinha — July 21, 2009 @ 12:03 pm
I can't wait for the next wave of sharing!
Comment by Glenn Friesen — July 21, 2009 @ 1:33 pm
That is a intriguing report.
But I agree with everyone's comments.I can not accept everything on faith.I use Twitter or Digg (both published FB)and email(MSIE8: [File]->[Send]).
Comment by Kazuhiko Sato — July 21, 2009 @ 7:13 pm
What happens when my links (e.g Delicious bookmarks, Diggs,etc.) are automatically published through Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed? Does it count twice?
Comment by Greg — July 22, 2009 @ 2:32 am
Yes, and Facebook is in its infancy, as is user behavior on such networks as Facebook. It is a mainstream network, and as such Facebook has an important role to play. However, most of us have only just begun to figure out what communication go through which channels. In addition, few mature enterprises live in the cloud, and almost none use Facebook groups to conduct meaningful inter-enterprise communication. So that means important sets of communications — some of which dominate a person's attention in any given day (because they have to know what is in that particular inter-enterprise content — is not being counted. I think Mr. Sinha's, Mr. Sato's, and Greg's comments are all wise perspectives. The measurement of user behavior continues to evolve. However, this is harbinger that Facebook is an interface people use to say “hey what's up,'' and perhaps a great deal more, and also it is something for which addtoany should be applauded for releasing.
Comment by John Evan Frook — July 23, 2009 @ 6:01 am
is that report available/public for reviewing? its interesting stuff but it would also be interesting to see more insights about how this research was conducted…if anyone can share it, i´d apreciate it.
Comment by arzuvialde — July 27, 2009 @ 7:30 am
More on this subject can be found here, including interesting comments from readers:
http://mashable.com/2009/07/20/facebook-sharing-d...
Comment by Eckard Pfeifer — August 1, 2009 @ 7:43 am
[...] Facebook accounted for 44 percent of AddThis sharing volume in 2010, up from 33 percent the previous year. [...]
Pingback by Facebook Tops AddThis Sharing In 2010 — December 30, 2010 @ 11:29 am