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Many writers, including Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin, have postulated that certain people have a propensity to share content more frequently and with more people than the average. I was able to use respondents’ answers to the reach and frequency questions for both individual and one-to-many sharing to study these types of users in more depth. I defined a “High Reach” sharer as a person who either shared content individually with 10 or more people on a regular basis or reached more than 100 people when they share content in a one-to-many way. Using this definition, 74 people were high reach individual sharers, and 64 were high reach one-to-many sharers. “High Frequency” sharers are those that share in either individual or one-to-many ways more than once a day; this group accounted for just under 100 people.

The cross-over percentages are shown in the graphs below:

32.4% (24 people out of 74) of high-reach individual sharers were also high-reach one-to-many sharers, 56.8% (42 out of 74) were also high-frequency individual sharers and 39.1% (29 out of 74) were also high-frequency individual sharers.

37.5% (24 out of 64) of high-reach one-to-many sharers were also high-reach individual sharers, 39.1% (25 out of 64) were also high-frequency individual sharers and 51.6% (33 out of 64) of them were also high-frequency one-to-many sharers.

42.4% (42 out of 99) of high-frequency individual sharers were also high-reach individual sharers; 25.3% (25 out of 99) were also high-reach one-to-many sharers, and 52.5% (52 out of 99) were also high-frequency one-to-many sharers.

29.6% (29 out of 98) of high-frequency one-to-many sharers were also high-reach individual sharers; 33.7% (33 out of 98) were also high-reach one-to-many sharers and 53.1% (52 out of 98) were also high-frequency individual sharers.

In the following data, I focused on areas where the high-reach or high-frequency sharers differed from the average respondent in order to identify ways in which a content creator can target these valuable users. The following graphs show the content sharing characteristics of these high reach and frequency individuals.

High-Frequency Sharers

High frequency individual and one-to-many sharers tend to share content both individually and one-to-many with more people than the average. High frequency individual sharers share with more people individually than high-frequency one-to-many sharers, and, as expected, the reciprocal is true of high-frequency one-to-many sharing and their increased one-to-many reach. When sharing individually, high-frequency sharers tend to share content from every source tested more than the average respondent did, especially favoring blogs, social news sites and Twitter; when sharing one-to-many, they showed similar patterns. High-frequency sharers also demonstrate the same content type preferences as many of the high-engagement profiles I studied, reporting proclivities for news and opinion while sharing humor and fiction at the same or lower rates than the average in both individual and one-to-many contexts. High-frequency sharers share via instant messaging more often than the average, while sharing at the same or lower levels via Facebook and email.

High-Reach Sharers

Both high-reach individual and one-to-many sharers tend to share content with others more frequently, with high-reach individual sharers showing a much stronger disposition to more-than-once-a-day individual sharing than either the average or high-reach sharers of the one-to-many variety. High-reach sharers of both types share content from Twitter individually far more than the average; they also favor nearly every other source except email and Facebook. When sharing one-to-many, high-reach individuals share content from every source more than the average with almost the same difference for each source tested. In an interesting departure from previously seen patterns, high-reach individual sharers show the typical news, opinion and instructional content bias much less than their high-reach one-to-many sharing counterparts. When sharing individually, high-reach one-to-many sharers favor instructional content much more than both the average respondent and high-reach individual sharers, and when sharing one-to-many, they strongly favor news, opinion, instructional content and warnings.

Next: How to Use This Data.
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Viral Content Sharing Report: Table of Contents