Don’t Forget About Email

Posted by Russell Scibetti Published in Marketing, Social Media

At this point, everyone should understand how important it is to integrate social sharing links into any web-based campaign. These links provide an easy mechanism for fans to share the message with others and hopefully create a viral-like distribution for the campaign.

While I completely agree with this approach, I just saw an interesting report from Marketing Sherpa on the most common ways that people share links with friends and family. Take a look at the chart below:

The primary link sharing method of choice is clearly still email. This is about 3.5x the number of percentage of people that share links via social media. Unfortunately I do not have a chart that shows the results of this question over time, but I’m sure that the social media percentage has increased as Twitter and Facebook grow in popularity. In spite of this, for the time being email is still the king of link sharing. So don’t forget to include an “Email to a Friend” link with the rest of your sharing options and encourage your fans to email your links to others – they will probably be more likely to respond.

Print This Post

Happy Father’s Day (June 13th, 2013)
Guest Post: Writing an Effective Creative Brief (June 6th, 2013)
Excerpt from Social Media in Sport Marketing (June 4th, 2013)
Sports Marketing Now with Matt McCormack (March 28th, 2013)
Harlem Shake Makes the Rounds (March 8th, 2013)

3 users responded in this post

Subscribe to this post comment rss or trackback url

TimNATC said on October 22nd, 2009 at 5:35 pm

Thanks for the tip! You bring up a very good point. Especially for those who are just getting their feet wet with social networking.

Chris said on October 22nd, 2009 at 8:52 pm

Very interesting article/post. Leads me to a few questions:

A. What would be included in “other”?
B. How is a link shared via phone/conversation? I assume this method would be more of a general reference to the article (ie. “look for the ‘don’t forget about email’ post on business of sports”)
C. How are these link sharing methods received? For example, while 13% of people may share a link through phone, are the people on the other end actually going to the link?

mutuelle said on November 6th, 2009 at 7:06 pm

Informative post,I have noticed that the most tool used for sharing links and even content on web is emails,it’s the most classical way for connection over net,then I saw that some of my friends and people in general ,found the way of social bookmarking.