New Sharing Stats Every Content Marketer Needs To Know

Yesterday, it was all about search. Today, it’s all about sharing.

The way that people discover and engage with content is quickly changing, and publishers big, small and brand-funded are looking for ways to make their content take off. And while analyzing your Google and Bit.ly Analytics yield great insights, you often need to take a birds-eye view at the larger sharing trends in action.

ShareThis, a publishing tools startup, is able to track several million publishers and the sharing behavior of their users. From those analyses, they have a pulse on where people are looking for content.

Their most recent findings?

ShareThis’s Q3 Consumer Sharing Report found that Pinterest sharing is up 19%, Linkedin’s up 15%, Facebook’s up 15% and — sad trombone — Twitter is down 8%. These findings confirm several trends we’ve analyzed in recent months.

First, people are looking for content to share — and in particular visual and multimedia content. Pinners on mobile and tablet share on Pinterest at almost three times the rate as on Facebook.

Secondly, mobile and tablet users are good for sharing. In fact, in a separate report, ShareThis found that social interactions happen at twice the rate on mobile and tablet devices as it does on desktop.

For publishers, this is, on the whole, very good news. But it does require a shift in mindset.

As Quartz and other publishers have found, mobile use tends to be concentrated in the later hours of the day. So content strategists will want to spend time breaking out of their daily work routines and understanding the needs of the late-in-the-day content consumer.

Next, publishers need to take mobile-first apps, such as Pinterest and mobile chat apps, seriously as places where consumers are spending the majority of their time. Pinterest is increasing its commitment to publishing, with new pins designed for article sharing. Some publishers are reaping the rewards from Pinterest already. In fact, BuzzFeed reports more traffic from Pinterest than Twitter.

And, because pins tend to have a longer sharing life than articles shared to other networks, there’s an additional incentive to push to the platform. As analytics company Piquora just determined in a report, Pinterest pins deliver two site visits and six page views on average, plus more than 10 re-pins, with traffic to the pins often continuing for several months. “Good pins are frozen in time on Pinterest,” Piquora CEO Sharad Verma told Tech crunch.

The entire report is a must-read for publishers and content strategists. So take a deeper dive on their blog, and with the accompanying infographic below.

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