Blogzilla - A web design oriented weblog by Izilla Web Development, Newcastle and Sydney, NSW Australia

Sharethis is a widget developed by ShareThis, Inc. that allows online publishers and users to instantly access all profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing and updating via a expanable menu installed to your blog or website.

It also provides the means to track details of how users of your blog/website are choosing to share your content out of the many available options such as Facebook, Myspace, Wordpress, email etc. After registering a free account with Sharethis, users are then able to login and view this “means of sharing” information via provided pie and line graphs.

Now what if I wanted to gain a broader understanding of how users are choosing to share content beyond the statistics of my own domain’s sharing activity? Well Sharethis are about to provide the results of an extensive study on sharing with Forrester Research.

"Forrester and ShareThis, teamed up to find out what and how people are sharing information online with one another. This is part of ShareThis’s continued effort to help online publishers better understand how their users are interacting and sharing the things they are interested in across their networks. This study, which will be released next week, provides some really interesting statistics around how people share, including:"

• Email is still primary channel for sharing – 69% of adults cite email as the primary source of sharing information
• Less than 1/3 of online adults said they learned about the new content from generally shared content sources such as YouTube, a wiki, or social networking sites
• 84% of people still use the traditional cut and paste method to share a URL or information
• Though the primary motivation for sharing differs, 81% of adults claim that they share to help others – believing that a person will benefit from the information they share
• Sharing increases site traffic 2x, thus increasing ad dollars or revenue for publishers
• Men are more likely to share recommendations and videos than women; 77 percent of adult males and 74 of younger males shared news and web links
• Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via easy or direct sharing methods (ie texting)

Needless to say the full report should be an interesting read. I’ll attempt to publish the entire thing once released.

Related Links

• Sharethis