iPhone named 'Most Social Device,' leads mobile and desktop in Web content sharing

ShareThis, the company responsible for the embeddable content sharing button found on many popular websites, published the results of a 30-day study to its blog on Tuesday, which found Apple's iPhone to be the "Most Social Device" on its network of 2.4 million sites.

The firm monitored and compared 4.9 billion "social signals" originating from desktops against 1.2 billion signals from mobile devices in its attempt to better understand sharing patterns across its network.

Apple's iPhone racked up the highest per-device stats with 12.4 percent of users more likely to share while on the device. Second and third place went to Android and BlackBerry, which showed 7.4 and 6.3 percent, respectively. As can be expected, most mobile sharing went through social media websites Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Facebook, for example, accounted for 60 percent of all mobile sharing.

On the desktop side, Mac led with 5 percent, while 3.9 percent of PC users clicked the share button. Although mobile users are more likely to share links to interesting content, more Internet shopping is done on desktops.

The percentages were representative of an overall skew toward smartphones, which the study limited to iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry handsets. Mobile device users were almost twice as likely to share content versus desktop users. Overall, content sharing accounted for 7.7 percent of all mobile Web activity, compared to 4.1 percent on desktop.

One interesting metric was the split in content consumption as a function of device screen size. The study's data suggests iPad users browse and share more image-heavy content, like recipes and fashion, while iPhone users focus on socializing, listening to music, and reading news.

The report comes after Apple announced 31.2 million iPhones were sold during the second quarter of 2013, up from 26 million over the same period last year.