96% of Social Media Messages Embed or Link to Content

About 96 percent of the social media sharing that happens online is of content, a study by AOL and Nielsen Online 10,000 social media messages suggests.

About 60 percent of social media messages consist of links to published content, while 36 percent of shares were of content directly embedded into the messages. Only about four percent of social media messages contained links to URLs for brands or corporate websites. As its name suggests, social media really are a form of media.

60% of Social Media Messages are Links to Published Content