Facebook Corners 44% of Social Sharing
February 18, 2010, 4:59 am
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?
















