4 Comments »According to the people at addtoany, the volume of information being shared around the web through Facebook has increased dramatically over the past year. Specifically, Facebook now accounts for 24 percent of all items being shared in contrast to email which now accounts for 11.1 percent. Not surprisingly, Twitter now accounts for 10.8 percent of all items shared. I reached out to the company to find out what sampling size the company has.
While Pat Diven of AddToAny couldn’t provide specific details, he said that their widget is accessed over 1.5 billion times per month. The other two leaders AddThis and Share This also have a large number of implementations around the web, providing for a significant sample size. Justin Thorp of AddThis, which is 20 times larger than AddToAny, told us that Facebook is also the largest sharing site through their platform, accounting for 23.5 percent of shares, almost identical to AddToAny’s statistics.
What’s clear is that Facebook continues to single handedly eat away from email as one of the primary communication channels. The platform is also now the largest for sharing information although Twitter appears to be taking a large volume away as they have a large percentage of the market of users who actively share. The next step for Facebook is to become one of the primary communication channels by improving their inbox.
The company has steadily improved the inbox product, however it is still significantly lacking. There’s no way to export messages and there is no email support. It’s also not easy to sort through a large number of messages. Regardless of all the downfalls, Facebook has become the most dominant sharing platform online and continues to grow daily. If Facebook can keep this up, the number of links passing through the site could potentially rival the number of links being crawled by Google.
Do you use Facebook as your primary sharing channel?
