You can’t spend too much time on TechCrunch without running into metrics like time on site and unique monthly visits. While both of these measures are valuable to the platforms themselves, they don’t tell brands a whole lot about what consumers actually do on the platform; important engagement behaviors such as liking, sharing and clicking remain a mystery.
A new study from Gigya tries to shed some light on the sharing side of the equation. Their Q2 2013 survey examines where the majority of sharing happens, with a nice side-by-side comparison to see whether consumer and brand sharing efforts line up.
In the chart below, you can see that the majority of consumers’ sharing happens on Facebook, followed somewhat distantly by Twitter and Pinterest. Overall, the ratios are about the same; not surprisingly, brands and consumers both do the vast majority of their sharing on Facebook and Twitter. In other good news, brands do at least some sharing on each of the platforms that consumers share on (or at least those that were measured in this study). 
One noticeable sharing difference between consumers and brands is Pinterest. While consumers do 16% of their sharing here, brands are only using pins to share about 2% of their content. This points to a missed opportunity — consumers are finding and sharing a ton of content via Pinterest, but brands aren’t putting a whole lot of content out there to be re-shared.
For consumers and brands alike, LinkedIn and Google+ both get a very small about of sharing, at least compared to Facebook and Twitter. It will be interesting to watch whether LinkedIn sharing increases as the professional network re-imagines itself as a content platform.
