UK Newspapers & Social Bookmarking

I’ve been doing some research into UK newspapers and social media share options recently and thought I’d share the results here.

Below is a round-up of the main findings followed by a slideshow of the results with graphs and pie charts.

(Further details on the phenomenon of social bookmarking can be found in previous posts – follow the links on the right.)

Main Findings:

Share options on national and regional news sites in the UK are dominated by five social bookmarking sites - Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon.

These five account for 80.6% of the total number of share buttons made available by articles on regional news websites and 63.5% on national newspaper websites.

Data collected from 34 websites shows that 94.1% of them include Digg and Delicious among their bookmarking icons, 85.3% feature Reddit, 82.4% have Facebook and 70.6% include StumbleUpon.

Also featuring in the top ten most common share options are NewsVine (44.1%), Fark (29.4%), Yahoo! My Web (29.4%), Google Bookmarks (23.5%), and Technorati (20.6%).

National – Regional Differences

There are some pronounced differences between the share options displayed by national news sites and their regional counterparts.

Three national sites have the Add This widget (standard one offers links to 39 bookmarking sites) while no regional sites yet include it.

The inclusion of the Add This widget means nationals have a higher average of share buttons per site – 12.5 – in comparison to the average for the regionals of 5.4.

However, regionals have a higher mode with 5 share buttons per site in comparison to the nationals which have a mode of 4.

The type of bookmarks used also distinguishes the two groups, with links to sites such as Fark, NewsVine, MySpace and NowPublic proving much more popular among nationals than regionals.

While regional websites have a greater percentage of websites using the StumbleUpon (up 18.9% against nationals) and Facebook buttons (up 16.2% against the nationals).

UK Newspapers & Social Bookmarking

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