Now, there’s part of me that rebels against this. My choice would be to have less cluttered page designs. But it’s becoming very, very clear that social sharing is becoming a big driver of traffic, not just to my blog, but much of what we publish. 

The latest study from [the good Pew people highlights](http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online) that our metrics are far from unique:

> Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links

I do wonder if the results show a combination of more mainstream adoption of Facebook than Twitter, alongside a tendency for national media to choose Facebook sharing over others when they integrate options into their pages.

We see a very mixed bag here. Some markets, like [Farming](http://www.fwi.co.uk) and [Hairdressing ](http://www.hji.co.uk)are all about the Facebook. [Estates Gazette](http://www.estatesgazette.com) does very well out of LinkedIn. Here? It’s the Twitter, in the main, with odd spikes from LinkedIn and Facebook (my [last post](http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2011/05/is_the_social_web_reducing_our_access_to.html) is on 29 likes at the time of writing, for example). 

And that sort of information is why experimenting with this stuff is so important. Given how fast the Tumblr community is growing, I’ll be very interested to see how the new button works (and I’ll be even more interested if they create a more customisable version that allows me to force the URL shared, and thus make it workable from the blog homepage). 

So, uh, feel free to share this, however you like. 🙂