We’re indebted once again to Clearspring Technologies for sharing another survey with us.
Last year’s social media sharing trends study and infographic made for some fascinating and thought-provoking reading, and was well received all round. Well, fortunately for us they’ve gone and repeated the exercise, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint. The Sharing Trends survey/infographic doesn’t just look at the most popular sharing services and social platforms: it also looks back at the most popular stories shared by users throughout the course of the year. That’s what makes it so fascinating.
Many of the stories will be familiar, and we probably shared some of them ourselves.
However, it’s only when you look back retrospectively that you can start to appreciate the true significance and impact of the shared story. You may even wonder why some of the stories you considered important at the time never ultimately made the grade. The answer – well nobody knows: they do say there’s nowt as queer as folk after all. So, thanks once again to Clearspring: we’re already looking forward to next year’s.
The top services:
- Facebook makes up 52.1% of all sharing on the internet.
- Twitter now accounts for 13.5% of sharing: a massive increase of 576.9% on 2010.
- Tumblr’s sharing has grown by 1299.9% and shows no signs of slowing down.
- Address Bar sharing has created an astonishing 1600% viral shift.
Notable facts:
- StumbleUpon created a 320% viral lift.
- Google+ has grown by 373% but has now plateaued.
- Email, print and favourites make up 14.4% of sharing.
- Digg’s sharing is continuing to decline by 47.7%.
- MySpace goes from bad to worse and is down by a further 56.9%.
Mobile sharing.
With the worldwide explosion in mobile and portable handheld devices and the increasing use of mobile browsing, we were guaranteed to get some notable sharing figures this year. What we actually got was far more astonishing than any of us would ever have dreamt of.
Sharing via mobile devices like he iPhone, iPad and Android has increased by 600% in 2011.
- Sharing on the iPad surpassed the iPhone from June 2011 onwards: iPad sharing grew by 597.6% in 2011.
- Occupy Wall Street caused a 217% spike in mobile sharing on October 26th.
The year’s most shared events.
Some of these shared stories you could’ve probably guessed, as it has been a year crammed with remarkable news and historic events. The timeline from February onwards reads like this:
- Super Bowl.
- Egypt – Mubarak’s resignation.
- The Japanese Tsunami.
- The Royal wedding.
- The death of Osama Bin Laden: 28% of the shares on Addthis.com were solely about the death of the al qaeda leader on the 1st and 2nd of May.
- The final Space Shuttle mission.
- The US East Coast earthquake.
- Hurricane Irene.
- The death of Steve Jobs.
- Occupy wall Street.
- The Kardashian divorce.
The unusual facts about sharing.
- 73% of the top worldwide shares were either about death or disaster, proving we’re all obsessed by bad news.
- Twitter accounts for 52% of all sharing in Japan.
- Google sharing declined by 8% this year, and that’s in spite of the introduction of +1.
