Focusing on Sharing Options: Less is More?
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
On Monday, Mashable posted an interesting study done by sharing company, AddToAny. AddToAny is in a unique position to exmaine at the resulting data gathered from people using its service while sharing things among their networks. Some great insights came out of the study as well as some accompanying perspectives from around the web:
- Facebook leads the pack – this is in-line with the size and growth of Facebook. It also signals a generational change of communication practices. People are spending more time communicating on the web inside social networks more than e-mail, which is extremely important to note.
- Don’t ignore direct communication – while the news is about Facebook, e-mail still holds strong. When developing content sharing strategies, never overlook the power of a direct and focused e-mail. It’s valuable to think of the context surrounding people when they’re communicating – most people are at work in front of a computer throughout the day and priorities get shifted to Inboxes instead of News Feeds.
- What’s missing? – A few things. Mashable doesn’t disclose the sample size and the report itself doesn’t take into account somet things that commentors point out: huge properties like CNN and The NYT have native systems.
- Mike Hudack, CEO of blip.tv, starts a pretty healthy discussion on Tumblr about the merits of focusing your sharing options. Instead of using a widget, what if you had highly customized Facebook-only or Twitter-only sharing options?
- Christine Beardsell counters: how valuable in the sharing ecosystem is someone on Digg or Yahoo vs. Facebook? Properly, she points out two huge strategic caveats – who is your audience and how are you measuring?
