A recent survey indicates that sharing is becoming an important source of traffic to web sites, and Facebook users are providing more sharing traffic than anyone else.
The report was put together by the trio of ShareThis, Starcom MediaVest Group and Rubinson Partner. 300 million people a month pass links through ShareThis buttons and this data formed the basis for the sharing study.
The first thing that stands out is that 10% of all web traffic is generated through sharing links, with 31% of all referral traffic being shares. Web sites who don’t make it easy for people to share their links are missing out on this valuable traffic source.
Facebook is the most popular sharing portal with 38% of all sharing being done via the site, email and Twitter were joint second with 17%. These figures are shared links that were clicked upon (ie an action was taken), if you look at the wider number of links that were shared (but may not have generated any traffic back to the original site) Facebook’s share rises to 56%.
When it comes to shared links being clicked, most may happen via Facebook but links on Twitter are clicked more often. On average a Twitter link is clicked 4.9 times, Facebook links 4.3 times and email ones 1.7.
Links don’t spread virally across social networks. People who know you are likely to click a link you share, but people they pass the links onto are less likely to follow the link since they don’t have a prior connection to you.
There’s more interesting information available from the TechCrunch article in the source link.
Source: TechCrunch — ShareThis Study: Facebook Accounts For 38 Percent Of Sharing Traffic On The Web
