While social sites drive an increasing portion of traffic to content publishers compared to long-time referral giant Google, one sharing service reminds us today that email is still a major source of shared links and clickthroughs. Email — the original social network — is responsible for 70 percent of total shares and 48 percent of visits generated by shares, according to data collected by link tracker Tynt.
Source: Tynt
Widget maker Gigya recently attributed 44 percent of its shared items to Facebook and 29 percent to Twitter, while competitor AddThis said Facebook accounts for 33 percent of its shared items and Twitter, 9 percent. Both companies gleaned their data from user activities on the buttons they publish on thousands of sites. But Tynt — which has a slightly different method of tracking copy-and-paste activity from users on its 400,000 publisher partner sites — says they’re both way off, with Facebook accounting for 25 percent of shares and Twitter 1 percent, behind email’s 70 percent.
Source: Tynt
Tynt claims that its data is more comprehensive, estimating that 2 percent of the web’s page views results in content sharing via copy and paste, while .04 percent come from button-based sharing and .2 percent from link shorteners. While I find it a bit hard to believe that 2 percent of page views are then shared (I’m a pretty avid sharer, and I don’t think I share that much), some of Tynt’s data tells a compelling story. For instance, Digg accounts for only 0.2 percent of shared links, but 5 percent of new visits generated by shares, meaning Digg users are much more likely to click on links they find on the site (which is, after all, the purpose of Digg). What I’d like to see are figures for sharing via instant messenger — for me, probably the source of links that I’m mostly likely to click through.
In the spirit of this post, I should say that I found the Tynt blog post via the new site Mediagazer, where the company is an advertiser.
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I can certainly agree with that; we still see similar in our research. Email remains a killer app; most likely because it’s boring.
http://www.mediabadger.com/2010/02/why-email-is-still-the-killer-app-of-social-media/
Great post!
[...] site wouldn't brand their own content (and possibly not their fault as I snagged it from GigaOM), but it's a lesson to us all brand that sucker when you send it because you never know [...]
@giles, it’s because it’s most effective. it’s opt in and requires no effort. watch for it to continue to be a major delivery method of choice.
Yes, email is easy to forget. And, features like wave are simply attempts to extend the reach of a message. Although I use Twitter for people I do not know too well, email is the primary sharing mechanism for those that are close.
Interesting data, but I’m not sure it supports the implied exhortation in your title — “Don’t forget about email.” Tynt’s data is gleaned from copy-paste analysis, not pushes of a “share” button. That their e-mail numbers are that much higher than Gigya’s numbers tells me that this e-mailed based social sharing is happening without the use of social sharing widgets or any other assistive devices. That instead of using the “send to a friend” feature, they’re firing up their e-mail client and writing the e-mail with a copy-paste.
That’s good news — site operators don’t have to do anything to benefit. It also tells me that universal sharing methods (like firing up an e-mail client) outperform site-specific methods of sharing (like the “share” buttons that can vary from site to site).
Maybe eventually we can stop littering our sites with an endless parade of social sharing buttons and look to tools that are built into the browser or the OS to sate people’s appetite for sharing.
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Sharing might be the in thing but only search engine traffic and subscribers are of any use to a website
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I use e-mail for business. But, lately even my family and friends all send me messages through Facebook. When I log into Facebook, there they are ready to chat. I am finally trying to clean up my account, and now it makes more sense. I don’t think e-mail will die anytime soon, because when you need private work to be done, you can’t beat e-mail.