A new study released by BrightEdge reports the amount of traffic that comes from Twitter, Facebook and other social share buttons on websites. The data reveals that sites with a Twitter share button “drove almost 7 times more link mentions on average” than sites without the share button.
Highlights from the BrightEdge SocialShare Analysis:
- 53.6% of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web display a social link or share button on their home page for one of the four major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn)
- Nearly half of the largest 10,000 sites on the Web still don’t display any kind of social sharing links or buttons
- Facebook plug-ins are the most popular: just over 50% of the world’s largest sites have a Facebook “like” button or links to Fan pages
- Twitter comes in next, with buttons and links visible on 42.5% of the world’s largest sites
- Google+ can be found on about 8.1% of these sites
- LinkedIn buttons and links are only present on 4% of these sites
The study ‘included a detailed analysis of 4 million randomly sampled tweets.’ BrightEdge’s Social Share Engine determined if the tweets carried shared information and then identified whether the content was shared using tools, buttons, links or other methods, as reported by MediaPost.
