Our partner, ShareThis released a survey recently about how content is shared in different channels.  Email remains the tool of choice for sharing content; accounting for 46% of content-sharing activity compared to 33% for Facebook, 14.5% via other channels and just 6% for Twitter. According to new research from Share This, Twitter and Facebook may be all the rage, but ordinary email is still king when it comes to sharing content online.

People who receive links through ShareThis also tend to spend time with the content, at an average 2.95 page views per click, followed by Facebook (2.76), with Twitter trailing at 1.66. This information definitely supports the notion that information being sent to you by friends is more highly regarded and trusted over the vast amount of content pushed directly to online audiences by businesses and organizations.

The company's "ShareThis" button has become ubiquitous at the end of articles and blog posts, linking to a widget that lets users share material via email, instant messenger and social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon and Yahoo Buzz. With user data from 200 million monthly visitors across 130,000 sites, the service has amassed a wealth of data about how people share and engage with content.

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