Study on Online Social Sharing

ShareThis recently releases a new study that looked at online social sharing behaviors. The study looked at ShareThis data which compromised of seven billion sharing signals from over 300 million users across the top 1000 publisher websites. The study found several interesting takeaways:

• Sharing produces an estimated 10% of Internet traffic
• Sharing produces an estimated 31% of referral traffic to sites
• Twitter accounts for 11% of all sharing referral traffic (Facebook 38% & Email 17%) for those that clicked through
• Twitter accounted for 8% (down from12%) in regards to raw sharing.

I also want to mention a recent study, 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors, that took a look at social metrics that affected search engine rankings. From this study they found that Facebook shares were considered more influential (.28) versus the shared URLs in Tweets (.17). 

Page Level Social Metrics