Facebook dominates social sharing

ShareThis’s analysis of the sharing behavior of more than 2 million U.S. consumers from over 3 million websites and apps found that, in Q4 2014, Facebook dominated with 81% of social shares. That’s a rise of 8.2% on January 2014, and leaves the other channels in the dust.

Sharing activity on other channels fell. Twitter saw a decline of 3%, Pinterest 0.6% and Reddit 0.7%.

However, the report highlights the behavioral differences between the various social media outlets. While Facebook is a “basic social media outlet”, others such as Pinterest and Twitter “have become outlets for niche interests”, comments Michalene Becker, manager of strategy and analytics at ShareThis. It’s no surprise, therefore, to learn from the report that Pinterest is the leading channel for shares of food, drink, beauty and fitness content while sport dominates Twitter conversations.

According to the report, mobile accounted for a significant share of browsing and sharing activity as of December.

“Mobile sharing represents nearly 20% of total activity within mobile devices, compared to only 6% within desktop environments,” writes Becker on the ShareThis blog. “Consumers are not just sharing more from their mobile devices, but they’re browsing more, too. Over the year, total browsing and sharing activity on mobile grew 32% to represent 66% of total activity and surpass desktop (34%).”