WATConsult

Social Bookmarking Trends: Top Sharing Activities

Social Bookmarking is a method to store, organize, search and manage bookmarks of web pages online by the users who want to remember/share it for further use. There are many bookmarking widgets available that publishers use to make the process of bookmarking easier for the visitors e.g. AddThis, ShareThis, TellyourFriend .etc.

But, how your visitor uses it? Which one they prefer over the other? Let’s discuss on this!

Recently, ShareThis released a report for popular social bookmarking and sharing activities through their bookmark button. Details below:-

Last year, AddThis released a comprehensive report on social bookmarking activities.  Aggregating the data it looks like as below (click to enlarge):-

Similar to the ShareThis report, AddThis released the top services for the month of July, 2008. Now, drawing a comparison between the AddThis top services and ShareThis trends, the chart seems as follows:-

It shows that sharing activity at Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon using the two services respectively result in almost equal percentage.

Now,  extending the AddThis report 2007 with AddThis July 2008 usage report and ShareThis July 2008 trends respectievely, we can see the following charts (click to enlarge):-

Now, with all the statistics above, we can interpret the following:-

1. Email is the ultimate social activity:- This might contribute to some extent in email spamming which is growing in absolute numbers (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

• 2005 - (June) 30 billion per day
• 2006 - (June) 55 billion per day
• 2007 - (February) 90 billion per day
• 2007 - (June) 100 billion per day

2. Facebook is growing rapidly:- Latest comScore report as well as Alexa ranking too shows the dominance of Facebook over other social networking sites.

3. Downfall in Google and Delicious bookmarks:- Downfall of delicious bookmark may be a reason behind the re-branding with delicious.com & new face lift.

4. People prefer sharing on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace than regular social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious .etc. It means first make friends and then push your content among them rather than the vice-versa. Is it due to change in ranking algorithms of the bookmarking sites that has made it difficult to get onto homepage and increase in number of click-monkeys?

Now, what these statistics tell us?

They teach a publisher to customize the AddThis bookmarking button and ShareThis button according to the latest trends and also keeping the type of content, demographics, and report for your individual site/blog in mind.