Saturday

Social Network

Is Facebook the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Service on the Web?

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ShareThis reports that it is now.

How do website readers prefer to share tales they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most standard method of sharing is now Facebook. The numbers are fascinating – but here are also some huge caveats to keep in mind.

The Numbers

In our enthusiasm for Web 2.0 style tools, many blog publishers may forget just how standard sharing by email is. It’s clearly the favorite method. Email sharing does tend to be one to one but, having items shared on Digg or Facebook has the potential to reach many, many more people.

The huge surprise here, though, is that Facebook and MySpace have emerged as hugely standard ways to share items from off-site. Have they found greater mainstream success in the relatively small time these sites have supported item sharing than dedicated social bookmarking sites that have in the years they have been online? It appears that may be the case.

We found these numbers via Amit Agarwal’s blog, which is always a fantastic place to learn new things about the web.

Why This is Vital

When publishers add the ShareThis system to their websites, they can choose which services to include buttons for. It’s an vital detail to take into consideration and knowing which services are most standard can help make this choice. Here at RWW we don’t use ShareThis, we use another benefit called AddThis. Looking at the numbers from ShareThis, though, would lead us to believe that sharing by email needs to be added and sharing by Facebook needs to be given higher billing in our widget. Other sites might make other decisions based on this data. GigaOm, for example, doesn’t offer sharing by Facebook at all – something our friend Om might want to change.

Caveats

A few things to take into consideration, but, include the following:

• Your site’s audience may vary. Different communities around different content topics probably have different trends in the sharing tools they use. We assume, for example, that here aren’t a lot of people sharing ReadWriteWeb tales on MySpace – but maybe we’re incorrect!
• Some of these services use bookmarklets. These numbers aren’t for all sharing, just sharing that goes on through the ShareThis widget. Tasty users, for example, don’t necessarily reckon of what they are doing as sharing (it’s often bookmarking for personal use) and that benefit has its own bookmarklet.

None the less, the take away here for us is this: email, Facebook and MySpace are very standard ways for people to share things online. Publishers neglect them at our own risk.