One of the most consistent requests we received this year from our clients was the desire to add “sharing tools” to their sites. The ability to quickly share a site’s content with friends is not only a nice site addition, it is now essentially a necessity.
There is some very interesting data coming out now showing how visitors are using these services. As expected Twitter and Facebook are dominating the amount of traffic, but from there it gets a little interesting.
Digital Inspiration reveals some analytics from Share This, a popular sharing service:
Twitter users click more..
According to ShareThis, while only 5% of the content-sharing activity happens on Twitter (compared to 33% on Facebook), Twitter users are more likely to click on shared links than Facebook users (see graph A).
This however doesn’t mean that Twitter users are more engaging – they have no other choice but to visit the shared page because the short URLs that they see inside the tweets rarely say anything about the destination. Facebook users, on the other hand, get to see image thumbnails and page excerpts in the share itself so they can better decide whether or not to visit the destination page.
..but Facebook users will spend more time
The other interesting part is that if a person lands on your site through Facebook, he will explore your site in greater detail than someone coming from Twitter. In numbers, a visitor from Twitter will check 1.66 pages on your site (average) while a Facebook user will spend more time checking out 2.76 pages.
See all the data, complete with some nice graphs.
