Survey results: social media is not the only popular method for sharing

– read about how we share differently depending on age

You’ve probably asked yourself this question more than once: How do people prefer to share something? How many shares? Does age affect the sharing? We conducted a survey, and the results point at some interesting aspects.

We asked around 1000 Swedes the question:
How do you most often tip your friends about something on the web?

The respondents are divided into the age groups:
15-22, 23-35, 36-55, 56+

The answering alternatives were:

Should we take for granted that people share content?

It could be argued that sharing is a part of human nature and culture. According to our survey 92,6 % of the respondents answer that they share things that they’ve got from the web. So there is a huge potential for your message to be shared, if done correctly.

And the winner is …

Guess what alternative got the most votes? ”By sending the link by email” won with 34,2 % of the votes. The silver medallist may surprise you, ”By talking to a person face to face” got 18,2 %. So we’re not totally digital yet.

Interesting aspects and variations

Email and personal meetings are the most popular when it comes to spreading interesting things found on the Internet. None of the other alternatives stands out particularly. But our analysis gets misleading if we don’t take into account that some of the alternatives actually are connected to each other.

If we combine the alternatives 2-4 and call them social media, alternatives 1 and 5 are called email and 6 and 7 are called offline – then we get the following numbers:

Social media: 17,5 %
Email: 43,4 %
Offline: 27,7 %

Email is still the most popular. Also the second place is unchanged. But we can see clearer that social media also plays a role regarding sharing. What also should be taken into account is that the content that is shared could have reached the sharer in different ways. The sharer could have come in contact with something via social media, which he then shares offline or vice versa. The different ways something can be shared tells us that the sharing of content is a complex apparatus that’s not always so obvious.

Based on age specific data, we can see that the popularity for email as a sharing medium increases as we move up thru the ages. This could be linked to the entering into adulthood and working life – our habits change in correlation to our occupation. However, it could also be linked to the fact that email has been popular much longer than social media, and has more users. There are also some interesting patterns in the statistics. How come that the share of people who prefer to tip their friends thru personal meetings, actually decreases with age? Could it have to do with that the older people get, the more of them retire from work and don’t socialise as much? What are the ”other” ways that 7,8% of all 56+ use to tip their friends? Is it mail, SMS, MMS or maybe smoke signals? Unfortunately, we don’t have the answer for that specific question.

But is email king in all ages?

It’s the 15 to 22 year-olds that’s going against the current. To them, email is only at third place.
 But then social media must be the most common way of sharing amongst our youngsters, right? It’s actually not that easy. The alternative that gets the most votes is number 7 (face to face). A digital generation uses an analog method the most. Isn’t that peculiar?

However, we mustn’t forget that some of the alternatives belong together. If we fuse together the same alternatives as we did before, we can do a more accurate determining of the different channels:

Social media: 39,2 %
Email: 22,3 %
Offline: 30 %

Now we can see that the sharing that is most common by youngsters is Internet, and particularly social media. However there is still 30 percent that rate offline as the most common way of sharing.

The key is finding the right mix tailored for your specific target group

Take the time to think a little extra about your marketing. Think about this article and if it gives you any new insights on how to improve your marketing. In what/which age segments is your target group situated? Does it consist of males or females or both?

By answering the former questions, you will get an idea on how you could distribute the budget for different media. How is your media budget right now? Does it need to be changed? Why? Maybe you should increase the budget for email? Maybe you should strengthen the bonds between email and social media in your marketing?

And don’t forget: The majority of people want to share.