Publishers who want to more widely distribute their content should pay attention to new data from AddToAny. According to the firm, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service, including e-mail.

Facebook accounts for 24 percent of uses of a widget created and marketed by AddToAny to share links to articles, videos and other content. E-mail came in at only 11.1 percent.

Yahoo’s properties, which include Delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz and Yahoo Messenger, came in second at 14.4 percent. Twitter came in third with 10.8 percent.

The results from this report are important. Most newspapers distribute headline and breaking news via e-mail, but how many have a regular publishing strategy focused on social media applications? Yet that’s where the sharing, re-publishing and re-tweeting is happening, not with forwarded e-mails.

The data isn’t all that surprising. Already in March, a Nielsen report, “Global Faces and Networked Places,” found that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken e-mail in terms of worldwide reach. According to the report, 66.8 percent of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities”—social networking or blogging sites—compared with 65.1 percent for e-mail.

Nielsen also found that social communities accounted for nearly 10 percent of all Internet time.