Which social bookmarking services are seeing the most activity from their user base? There’s a few surprises in these statistics from September.

The following data is taken from AddThis.com. AddThis is a great social bookmarking application that I talk more about in my article “Social bookmarking effect“.

Bookmarking activity figures from September:

Google: 17%
Favorites (browser bookmarks): 16.1%
Del.icio.us: 9.2%
Facebook: 7.1%
Windows Live: 6.6%
Digg: 5.6%
MyWeb (Yahoo): 4.9%
Furl: 4.4%
StumbleUpon: 3.5%
Ask: 3.5%
Reddit: 3.4%
Other: 18.6%

Given how commonly AddThis is used on sites these days, the above figures are probably a fairly accurate representation of the bigger picture. AddThis tracks around 36 bookmarking services.

The big surprise for me was Facebook - nowhere to be seen in the top 12 in May and in just 4 months it’s shot to number 4 - and against some very well established competition. That’s something certainly worthwhile looking into as the Facebook boom looks set to continue.

If you haven’t looked into using social bookmark sites as a way to increase traffic, take a peek at my article on social bookmarking. Implementing a multi-service application such as AddThis is dead easy, makes it easier for your visitors to add your site to their bookmarks and can pay off nicely for the small amount of effort involved.