Clearspring – the guys who produce the worlds largest content sharing platform – ‘AddThis’, recently released an infographic detailing global sharing behavior over the last 5 years. The stats were collated from 1.2 billion users and across 10 million domains.
The most interesting stats for me were:
- peak sharing occurs at 9:30am
- wednesdays are the best day for sharing
- 75% of clicks occur within the first day of a share
- Twitter has seen the most growth with a 35% increase in shares over the 5 year period
- Most sharing occurs via url copy & paste (up to 10x more than sharing tools)
I think the last point is really very interesting – we all know it can be challenging to measure word of mouth and the snowball effect of sharing – yet we also all know that it happens. While click-throughs can be a useful starting point in terms of ROI- we need to be aware that they don’t accurately reflect the full extent of sharing. You can’t argue with the fact that people love to share by copying and pasting url links – and that for as many people as you have clicking on the ‘facebook’ or ‘twitter’ share tools – there are another 10 copying and pasting the url link to share with their friends. As much as us marketeers may be able to influence ‘the consumer’ – sometimes they just like doing things their own way.
Here’s the infographic:
