Twitter is the Most Popular Social Sharing Option

Twitter is the most popular social sharing option on the 100 top blogs in the blogosphere. So says a recent report from Royal Pingdom that studied how common dedicated buttons, for different means of sharing web content, were on top blogs. The study found that dedicated Twitter buttons existed on 66 of the top 100 blogs (as per Technorati’s Top 100 list). Facebook buttons were only on 58 blogs, and Digg only on 43. Poor old Google Buzz is at the bottom of sharing choices.

While this is a very informative study and Royal Pingdom doesn’t actually claim that their data indicates any popularity of sharing option use by site visitors, the results can be misleading, because they only highlight the preferences of the publishers of the Top 100 blogs. Royal Pingdom points out that they are including social sharing widgets such as ShareThis and AddThis, only dedicated individual buttons for various social sharing sites.

Justin Thorp of AddThis provided some figures that paint a better picture of actual use of sharing options by site visitors. Their social sharing widget is used on over 800,000 websites, and data indicates that Twitter comprises only 8.28% of all sharing, coming in 4th after Facebook, email and print use. Facebook enjoys several times that amount, making up 30.82% of sharing. (See AddThis’ services page for more data on other means of sharing, and their publisher list to see which sites are using their widget.)

Of course, AddThis’ data considers 800,000 websites and over 600M website visitors. Royal Pingdom’s only considers the top 100 blogs. The latter’s study also precludes the possibility that people will use other means to share web content. Here are some examples, to clarify:

While Stumbleupon was included in the Royal Pingdom study, some “stumblers” prefer to use the Stumbleupon browser toolbar, available for certain browsers including Firefox.

People sometimes share web content directly to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Reddit, etc., by manually pasting in the URL. Or they might re-share/ retweet when they see that a social friend has already posted the content to Facebook or Twitter. (Aside: Social sharing widget ShareThis now has an option for monitoring conversation around content shared by the type of web content sharing buttons that Royal Pingdom refers to in their study.)

Web & mobile social sharing tools the likes of YourVersion mean that people can share a page of web content even if there’s no dedicated button, either directly from the site, from a browser toolbar, or a smartphone. (Note: I’m an unpaid tech evangelist for YourVersion.)

Digg has a new iPhone app that does not curently facilitate sharing of web content but might do so in the future.

Basically, this means that while dedicated Twitter buttons might be more prominently displayed on the Top 100 Blogs, it is not necessarily the most popular way for readers of those sites to share web content. What would be nice to see is comprehensive data of the top 1,000 (or even 10,000) blogs in terms of both the popularity of display of social sharing buttons, as well their actual use by site visitors.

source: socialtimes.

Introduction to Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a new term that was recently coined by Rohit Bhargava and has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO. SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

First of all "social media" is a buzzword that has been thrown around a lot lately. But what exactly does it really mean? Wikipedia describes social media as...

the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.

Also, social media can be considered anything that can help build a community to rally around. Companies/websites such as Digg, Delicious, Facebook, and Revver all fit the bill. These are all websites that can now be used as places to put out your marketing message. Spreading messages through blog posts and blog search engines also fits the bill. It is all about making something easy to spread, which, by the way, used to be called word-of-mouth. Buyer beware though, you can't force SMO. This is pull marketing; it is not "push your message onto someone marketing".

With SEO the goals are clearly defined, you're trying to make a website visible in the search engines. Is SMO really as simple to define as making your site visible in the social media? Does that entail anyway possible and include buying banner ads on MySpace?

Rohit defines the goals as...

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

... and then he lays out 5 rules for SMO...

Increase Your Linkability
Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
Reward Inbound Links
Help Your Content Travel
Encourage the Mashup
...Jeremiah Owyang gives us a couple more rules...

Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn't Help You
Reward Helpful and Valuable Users
In way it sounds a whole lot like Marketing 2.0. It is pretty much includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one, techniques such as; Linkbaiting, Usability Design, Buzz Marketing, Community Building, and anything that can be considered "pull marketing".

Here's a few more possible rules...

8. Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.

9. Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. I would love to have everyone using my product too, but you need to be realistic. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.

10. Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a whitepaper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.

11. Be real - The community does not reward fakers.

While social media optimization is becoming very important you can't forget about good old SEO either. Google and Yahoo still drive mass amounts of traffic and you ca not ignore them. It is all about leveraging new mediums and riding these waves. Even though you might be getting dirt on the white glove you still have to take advantage of these powerful channels.

I'm hoping these articles will encourage discussion and new rules that develop from others. As Rohit says...

There are many other "rules" and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. In the meantime we are always on the lookout for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking.

source: pronetadvertising