ShareThis, the world’s largest platform for sharing, collaborated along with Starcom MediaVest Group to release its First Comprehensive Study on Sharing; on 6th June 2011. This is the most comprehensive study of online social sharing to date; and has been conducted by former ARF Chief Research Officer, Joel Rubinson. This study is the first in a series of studies as part of an ongoing partnership between ShareThis and SMG.
Coverage of Studies:
- Over 7 Billion Sharing Signals across all major sharing channels
- Sharing pattern of 300 Million+ Monthly Users
- 1 Million Domains
- 1,000 Publishers websites
For the month of March 2011, all the above factors were analyzed in detail to Uncover Sharing Truths for Marketers
Why is this study important?
Online behaviour is a relatively new and unexplored field. In traditional marketing, Marketers worked their ideas based on customer behaviour pattern; which was easily explained using traditional psychology. In online world, there have been far and few studies to understand the customer behaviour pattern; and draw inferences from them. This study by ShareThis helps in gaining tremendously valuable insights into online behaviours of Internet users.
Every Internet users, from Marketer to SEO Analyst can use these insights to design more potent strategies which will give better results. This study helps the various Internet participants understand, how users are interacting with each other and online content; and how this is shaping the changing ‘Electronic media’ landscape.
Key points from the Study:
- Sharing is bigger than fans, friends & followers: More than 10% of all Internet traffic is generated via sharing!! Whereas a whopping 31% of referral traffic comes from Sharing. Sharing generates almost half of the traffic for websites and brands that is created by search
- Channel Share: Facebook is the major sharing channel, with 38% followed by Email at 17% and Twitter at 11%
- Sharing Channel & Content Connection: Sharing channel people use depends on the content being shared, while content about entertainment and music is more likely shared via ‘Social Networks’; more informative content is more likely shared via channels like Email and LinkedIn.
- Sharing is about scale, not virality: Shared links are, on average, across all sharing channels, clicked on 4.9 times each, so content shared by large groups of people reach a wider audience than content passed along from others.
- Share Influence linkage: Almost 80% of users tend to share only 1 category in a month. This means that marketers need to reach out to maximum number of users; since each user is an influential, but their area of influence might be quite limited to one or maybe two areas at the most. This is contrary to the popular notion of a bunch of people being influential in a all pervasive sort of way. As per this study, marketers need to focus on reaching as many people as possible to ensure further propagation.
- Sharing is about moments of relevance: Sharing is spontaneous, and happens when the ‘moment is relevant’. This study shows that by grabbing on these ‘moment of relevance’; marketers can reach out to the perfect audience base that is most receptive to their messages.
- Content Cluster: Study shows that users having interest in sharing a particular content, might have interest in certain other related content too. This gives rise to content clusters of content which are most likely to be shared in relation to one another.
Sharing is fast gaining popularity, and it is a critical aspect of online user behaviour. Sharing is also the easiest, fastest and cheapest way for companies to reach out to maximum number of customers. Hence it is becoming imperative to gain a better understanding of user sharing behaviour online. The more information marketers have about ‘sharing behaviour’, it’s who, what, when etc; the better they can work on to reap its benefits.
This is the first-of-its-kind study which will provide publishers, advertisers and marketers with a deeper look at online behaviour and concretely show just how important sharing is.
No comments:
Post a Comment