The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement | ShareThis
Published: December 16, 2009
Now we'll break down the stages of sharing, which we extrapolate into influence. Influence is calculated as Shares x Recipient Clicks x Engagement x Virality.
Despite reports of its demise, e-mail is still the most popular method of sharing, and despite its meteoric rise of late, Twitter is still not a very popular sharing channel. In our research, we found that 46 percent of shares came via e-mail, 33 percent from Facebook, 14 percent from other channels such as Digg, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, etc., and just 6 percent from Twitter.
However, once content is shared, it's interesting to watch how people respond. Of content shared, 40 percent of clicks come from shared articles on Twitter, 35 percent of clicks come from email and other social channels, and 25 percent of clicks come from Facebook.
We believe Twitter does extremely well on click-through rate because of 2 things: short tweets and URLs, which often mask the source and content of where you are heading (causing accidental clicks), and most importantly, the re-tweet, one of the strongest viral drivers for pass-along effect on any social network.
Most interesting, however, is what we found out about what happens *after* a user arrives to the share destination - how engaged users are by platform. We found that Twitter is the least engaging share platform with users visiting an average of 1.66 pages when they click through to a site, while users coming in off e-mail were the most engaged, visiting 2.95 pages, and Facebook trailing closely behind 2.76 page views. Of course this varies by vertical and site, but if you think about your own habits, it makes sense. Getting an emailed link from a friend may cause you to pay more attention than the more random discovery that you get on Twitter as you consume quick opinions. We think there is tremendous potential for Twitter to increase its engagement when and if better filters are applied - the type of filters that Facebook has built in from the start.
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