Share the Love

What makes social media so compelling is the ability to share information with others. ShareThis is a cool widget I use on my blog to enable users to share the posts with others and to easily post it on different sites like digg, StubleUpon, FriendFeed, etc or via email. Recently ShareThis commissioned a study conducted by Forrester Research, that analyzed the sharing patterns across a number of users. Following is an excerpt from their blog post:

High level findings:

• Email is still primary channel for sharing -- 69 percent of adults cite email as the primary source of receiving information
• Less than one-third of online adults said they learned about the new content from generally shared content sources such as YouTube, a wiki, or social networking sites
• 64 percent of adults and 60 percent of youth still use the traditional cut and paste  method to share a URL or information
  • However this is not trackable by publishers, making sharing by email tough to measure
• Though the primary motivation for sharing differs, 81 percent of adults claim that, when cutting and pasting content to share, they share to help others - believing that a person will benefit from the information they share

Surprisingly, email is still the primary channel for sharing and what was more interesting is that people still do it the old fashioned cut-and-paste way. The neat thing about using a tool like ShareThis is that it gives you a "one-click" way to share something with your network via email, IM or on any social media site. I somehow think that email is not quite the right format for sharing links and interesting articles. I like email to be more about actionable items: but then that is just me. I think FriendFeed, Twitter or Facebook is more suited for sharing links and other cool stuff.

There are a number of interesting nuggets on sharing demographics and differences in sharing behavior based on gender. From the post:

• The motivation for sharing amongst men differs than those of women
  • In general, men are more likely to share something to appear cool or to look like an expert
  • Men more likely to share product recommendations and video than women; 77 percent of adult males and 74 of younger males shared news and web links
• Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via easy or direct sharing methods
  • Women strongly favor send to a friend feature; more than 60 percent of adult woman use the send to a friend feature on websites
  • Women are more likely to share directly, especially via cell phone texting
  • Adult women tend to face more obstacles when trying to share content online, with 40 percent saying they could find no ways to share the information directly from the Web page

I read through parts of the report I had received from ShareThis -- lots of nice stats there. The full report can be requested from bizdev@sharethis.com (Unfortunately, I cannot post it directly here.)