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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Does Facebook Beat Email?
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Steve Smith

More content consumers now share articles and other media through social network Facebook than through email, says widget maker AddToAny. The company, which makes a popular widget designed for sharing content across sites, says that 24% of its shared media goes to Facebook. Email receives only 11.1% of content or shared links and Twitter gets 10.8%. Yahoo Bookmarks accounts for 5.5% and MySpace get 5% of content.

Top Shared Content Destination

Facebook 24.0%
Email 11.1%
Twitter 10.8%
Yahoo Bookmarks 5.5%
MySpace 5.0%
Windows Live 4.7%
Delicious 4.5%
Digg 4.4%
Google Bookmarks 4.0%
Yahoo Buzz 3.9%
Reddit 3.8%
StumbleUpon 3.4%
Bebo 3.1%
Mister-Wong 0.9%
Yahoo Messenger 0.5%
Evernote 0.5%
LinkedIn 0.4%
Netvibes Share 0.4%
Blogger Post 0.4%
Technorati 0.4%
Propeller 0.3%
Mixx 0.3%
Netlog 0.3%
Other 7.9%
Source: AdToAny

Wary digerati should keep in mind when reading these metrics that AdToAny is only a single widget, and we may presume that widget users are predisposed to use social networking over other formats. The surprisingly low performance of LinkedIn (.4%) also suggests a skew to the consumer, perhaps younger, audience. Nevertheless, another popular widget maker, AdThis, confirms to the AllFacebook blog that Facebook does indeed get nearly a quarter of content shares on its network.

Whatever the specific accuracy of the numbers, the study demonstrates an important trend no publisher can ignore. For key segments of the Internet population, social networks are becoming communications hubs that replace the stand-alone functionality of email and instant messaging. In the heyday of MySpace, many teens simply left their MySpace profile page open whenever they were online because it served as the place where messages moved in and out. As the communications tasks move off of stand-alone apps and into Web services, publishers need to devise strategies both for distributing content more effectively into these networks, and also to engage users while they are on the networks themselves.

If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com

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