Facebook is comfortably ahead of the social networking pack when it comes to the sharing of content, according to data provided to TechCrunch by Gigya.
According to Gigya, 44 percent of article links, videos, photos and other content from more than 5,000 sites that is shared through Gigya’s widgets are posted to Facebook. These sites include NBA.com, PGA.com and Answers.com, among others.
Twitter received 29 percent of this sharing through social media sites, followed by Yahoo! with 18 percent and MySpace with 9 percent.
AddThis affirmed this finding, as its numbers show that Facebook received 33 percent of observed sharing via the company’s sharing buttons. E-mail was second with 13 percent, followed by printing out copies of the content with 9 percent, Twitter with 9 percent, Favorites with 8 percent, Google with 6 percent and MySpace with 6 percent.
AddToAny, another company with a sharing widget, also shows that Facebook leads the way in terms of sharing, with 24 percent of such actions heading to Facebook.
In terms of site authentication (entering an existing username and password to log into another Web site), Facebook leads the way in the Entertainment, Live Event Chat and News categories, but with varying degrees of success in each.
In the Entertainment category, Facebook accounts for 52 percent of site authentication logins, while Google accounted for 17 percent. Yahoo! got 12 percent, followed by Twitter with 11 percent, MySpace with 7 percent and AOL with 1 percent.
For Live Event Chat, Facebook led the way with 56 percent, while Twitter followed with 28 percent of site authentication logins. Yahoo! followed with 9 percent, while MySpace had 7 percent.
For News, Facebook led by a slim margin with 31 percent of logins, followed closely by Google with 30 percent. Yahoo! wasn’t too far behind with 25 percent, while Twitter had 11 percent and AOL had 3 percent.
It’s clear that users of different sites appear more interested in different topics, and this might help site owners to better understand how their users share their content and how to make it easier for them to do so.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/facebook-44-percent-social-sharing/
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007530
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/02/facebook-corners-44-of-social-sharing.html
Digg 
