Facebook Overtakes Email to Become the Most Popular Sharing Method

Sharing is one of the biggest activities online. Be it news, links, videos, music, legally or illegally people share a lot of content on the Internet. Social media is becoming the preferred method and new numbers from AddToAny, makers of a popular widget allowing users to easily share content across multiple sites, show that Facebook is by far the biggest source with 24 percent of the shares on the widget coming from the social network.

The rise of social networking as the main way to share content isn't that surprising and neither is the decline of email, which now accounts for only 11 percent of shares. In fact, it was to be expected, now that social networking's reach passed that of email's earlier in the year, with “community sites” accessed by 66.8 percent of the world's Internet users and email used only by 65.1 percent of the online population.

The third most popular method of sharing content is now Twitter, gaining on email with 10.8 percent of shares. With the massive growth the microblogging site has seen, in recent months it has become a hub for activity and, considering that it has almost ten times less users than Facebook, it wouldn't be surprising to see it becoming the biggest source not so far in the future. MySpace on the other hand only got five percent of the shares, further confirming its decline.

Yahoo properties also did rather well, with Yahoo Bookmarks getting 5.5 percent, Delicious 4.5 percent and Yahoo Buzz 3.9 percent. Adding up Yahoo Messenger's 0.5 percent and the Internet giant makes up 14.4 percent of the shares, which puts it at number two after Facebook but ahead of email. Link aggregators also accounted for a fair portion of the shares, namely Digg with 4.4 percent, Reddit with 3.8 percent and StumbleUpon with 3.4 percent.