BrightEdge: More than 50% of websites use social sharing tools

One way websites and content publishers can get users to share their content is to make it very easy for them to do so. This includes placing social sharing buttons on their homepages to share to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

A study of the top 100,000 websites by SEO platform BrightEdge Technologies found that 53.6% of them included at least one social sharing tool or plugin, up from 52.8% in 2010.

Facebook is the most popular sharing tool, with 50.3% of websites including this tool, 42.5% of websites have Twitter sharing tools, 8.1% use Google+, and 4% use LinkedIN.

In order to understand the impact of these sharing tools on website traffic and how much content is shared, BrightEdge analyzed more than 4 million Twitter messages. Overall, the mention rate without Twitter sharing buttons is 4 times, and the mention rate with Twitter sharing buttons is 27 times. Using Twitter plug-ins can increase the mention rate by 6 times.

Obviously, social sharing buttons are a must.