Enabling readers to have easy access to share content is an important driver to increase awareness in the web 2.0 era. When readers of digital magazines, catalogs or marketing collateral find some interesting content, you can do yourself a big favor by helping them to share content on their favorite social network. A lot of readers are doing so every day, when reading Zmags. We looked into some data and found these trends:

Facebook is by far the most popular social media for digital readers.

Of all the times content has been shared, Facebook has been used almost 39 % of the time. That makes this tool the most popular social media for readers of digital issues. The casual way of communicating on Facebook seems to apply well for sharing content from digital issues. And to put it the other way around – it also means that readers are more likely to pick up content from Facebook, who recently announced that they exceeded 300 M users. Let this be a recommendation to all our customers, who want to get more readers.

Twitter only counts for ten percent of total shares

Despite of the buzz Twitter gets these days, it is not the media most readers of digital issues go to, when they want to share some interesting content. Less than 10 % of all shares are made through Twitter. Again there is less than 10 % of user accounts available here compared to Facebook. So we expect this share to grow over time.

Bookmarking tools are least popular among digital readers

Bookmarking tools such as Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg are used less among digital readers. There are different possible reasons for that. First of all the look-and-feel of digital issues imitates the hard copy and so does the way you are reading it. Apparently, sharing a bookmark to a specific page in a specific issue is not the first you think of, when you find something interesting. You will rather share a link to an entire issue. Thus the bookmarking tools lose popularity. In addition, most of the content in digital issues can’t be categorized as news. The social bookmarking tools apply to content that is breaking in terms of the news value.

Get more readers with Zmags in-built social media support

With the advent of Zmags social media support, which we released in July, readers get easy access to share content on their favorite social media. That exponentially expands the reach of digital issues. The result: marketers and publishers get additional readers at no cost.