Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.
Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost.
You can now chart how different services do against each other on the sharing front via a new services directory on AddThis. For instance, Google Bookmarks does much better than Google Reader, with 5 percent of all AddThis activity. It even beats Digg (which has 3 percent). Google Bookmarks is probably used more for personal bookmarking than for social consumption, but it is smack in the middle of Twitter and Digg when it comes to activity via AddThis.
Another comparison is Tumblr versus Posterous, which suggests that Tumblr is much more popular as a reposting tool, and is about neck-and-neck with WordPress.
Google Buzz is a social network and sharing product built by Google. Based within Google Profiles, Buzz offers a stream of status updates, pictures, links, and videos from your friends. You can “like†these items and you can comment on them. Updates from Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader, or Twitter can also be automatically imported into a Buzz stream. Buzz will recommend items you might like based on your friends’ activity. Buzz Features include: Buzz Online Auto-following: Buzz allows users can auto-follow...
Google Reader is an RSS aggregator released from Google Labs in late 2005. The service is capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds online or offline. The service was in beta until September 17, 2007.
AddThis, the new brand name for Clearspring Technologies, is the leader in socially connecting publishers, services and advertisers to audiences on the open web. Reaching more than 1.3 billion unique users monthly, AddThis’ social tools and analytics are used on more than 14 million unique domains to distribute and track digital content such as web pages, widgets, and videos to social networks, bookmarking sites, blogs, and more. To learn more visit AddThis.com The company formerly known as AddThis was acquired...
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