With traditional media flapping about Facebook and all a-twitter about Twitter, you'd be forgiven for thinking that social media sites were all people used to communicate online. But according to figures released this week, if you want to send a funny or amusing link to a friend, you're most likely to do it by good, old-fashioned email.

The figures come from ShareThis, who make the ubiquitous green widget for sharing online (you can see it at the end of this post). More than half of all their shares are sent by email.

Facebook's 21.2% portion of the market is really the only social media site worth writing home about: next most popular is MySpace, which ironically is often written off as "over" by the cool kids. Twitter, darling of the - ah - Twitterati, is barely visible on the chart, with a miserable 0.5% share of the shares.

I know from my own sites that people are certainly using share-by-email links; it's easy to discount or forget about them in favour of trendier sites, but for now at least, they're still the most important way to share that you can offer your readers.

Tags: email, ShareThis, social media

Posted by Sue on February 24, 2009 in News.