Facebook Still Dominates Overall Sharing Of Events, But Twitter And Reddit React More Quickly

In general, there is an understanding that people use Twitter and Reddit to discuss breaking news, while Facebook is used primarily for sharing less timely information. However, this idea usually comes from anecdotal evidence as opposed to coming from actual studies. Now, social data and sharing tool provider ShareThis is offering some hard data on these differences, and digital marketers are taking note of the findings.

ShareThis has published its quarterly report of consumer sharing behavior, containing data that is drawn from the 450 million unique users and 2.5 million sites and apps in the ShareThis network, and the findings provide some interesting insights.

One major finding is that Facebook continues to be the dominant social media platform for overall sharing. ShareThis focused on nine major events to determine this information, namely Shark Week, the NFL season opener, Burning Man, the Middle East/ISIS crisis, Ferguson, Derek Jeter’s final game, the Apple launch event, the Napa Valley earthquake and the Ice Bucket Challenge. ShareThis found that the overwhelming majority of sharing activity around these events occurred on Facebook, with an impressive 71%. Twitter was second at 21%, while Reddit, the only other network with a share of more than 1%, was at 6%.

Perhaps the most interesting finding, however, was that Facebook’s advantage is even stronger, at 85% of sharing activity, in the two to three weeks surrounding events. As an event date gets closer, activity on Twitter and Reddit increases, with Twitter activity growing by a factor of three within two or three days of an event.

The reaction to last month’s Apple iPhone 6 event provides a good example of the ebbs and flows of sharing. The report by ShareThis is worth analyzing to help marketers determine which network to focus on at key times around major events.

ShareThis writes the following in its report. “Apple’s keynote presentation on September 9th caused the internet to explode with buzz: activity reached nearly 40,000 shares the moment Tim Cook emerged on stage (a 400% increase in internet activity surrounding the event). Taking a closer look at the channel breakout of these shares, Twitter dominated online engagement during the presentation, outpacing Facebook by about 70%. At the conclusion of the event, most Twitter activity had died down and Facebook was once again the dominant channel, making up 68% of internet activity surrounding the event.”