As a relatively late adopter of "social", I was disappointed to find that the vast majority of sharing seems to be raw repeating. No opinion or contribution, just a contextless spray of links - bookmark broadcasting.
It would be interesting to see how the level of contribution when sharing varies by site/topic.
FB Likes and +1 are much harder to fake and seems to correlate more with actual human traffic.
From our experience +1 tends to be factored into Google search results so there is direct value in having +1 on your site and having your visitors who like the content click on it (not to mention it gets circulated inside Google Plus itself).
We are working to add more sites as we go along and we would be happy to share some information about patterns across sites and topics.
share_count: 7023
like_count: 14341
comment_count: 7328
total_count: 28692
The data might be useful for a project I'm working on. :)
Incidentally, I find hard to take seriously an article that enumerates things these days; too many blogs are doing this for the sake of getting page views (which works, but the resulting quality is often questionable, I'm looking at you Business Insider and Mashable)
Would love to get feedback from the community about which other types of information and analysis they would like to see.