Content Sharing Trends: Pinterest Grows to Rival Email

November 6, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Digital | Email | Social Media

ShareThis-Top-5-Sharing-Channels-During-Q3-Nov2013Facebook remains easily the leading channel for sharing content online, says ShareThis in a new report, but sharing via Pinterest is growing quickly this year and is almost on par with email as the third-largest channel. During September, Facebook accounted for a leading 57.3% of shares from websites that have the ShareThis tool embedded, significantly expanding its leading share from 42.4% a couple of months earlier in July. Twitter was the second-largest channel, with 19.3% of shares in September, followed by email (5.1%) and Pinterest (4.9%). LinkedIn closed out the top 5 sharing channels, with 2.1% of shares in September.

The ShareThis data is a useful indicator of sharing trends: the study says its analysis is based on sharing behavior across more than 120 social channels, reaching 95% of the US online population on desktop and mobile devices. Indeed, comScore recently reported that ShareThis boasted 85.6% reach among online Americans in September (desktop-only).

Meanwhile, the study shows that while the amount of sharing taking place via Facebook (+31.9%) and Twitter (+26.5%) has grown rapidly so far this year (from January through September), Pinterest and LinkedIn have been the fastest-growing channels. For the year-to-date, the amount of content shared via Pinterest has grown by 59%, while content sharing via LinkedIn is up by 44.1%.

By contrast, the amount of sharing occurring via email has actually decreased slightly – by 3.3% – over the course of this year.

Those trends largely apply to Q3, too. The amount of content sharing occurring via Pinterest (19.2%) and LinkedIn (15.1%) rose most rapidly during the quarter, slightly ahead of Facebook (+14.7%). Interestingly, though, content sharing via Twitter decreased by 7.6% during the quarter.

The strong growth of Pinterest and LinkedIn is reflected in their respective shares of the sharing market (excuse the pun). Pinterest’s 4.9% of shares in September was a significant boost from 3.4% in July, while LinkedIn’s 2.1% share in September was 40% higher than its 1.5% share in July.

Recent data from Shareaholic indicates that Pinterest’s stature is growing as a social referrer of website traffic. While that report showed Facebook easily the top social traffic referrer, it also demonstrated that Pinterest now drives more traffic to websites than Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and others ”“ combined.

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