Facebook Is King of Content Sharing

Facebook is the primary content-sharing method for internet users, though e-mail remains popular and, as reported here on Wednesday, Twitter is rapidly gaining ground.

Recent findings by AddToAny, provided as a Business Insider "Chart of the Day", broke down the various ways that people share content on the Web, finding that nearly a quarter of them use Facebook.

Applications such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon are among other options, but each accounts for less than 6% of the content-sharing usage, according to the chart.

Poynter Online's Will Sullivan points out that knowing how people use the Web to share information is important for news organizations, but accurately tracking the extent to which content-sharing sites drive people to their websites can be difficult. Analytics programmes may significantly under-report the number of referrals from sites such as Twitter, for instance.