Social networking offers users a place where they can share links and comments with a much wider audience with a single click – and I can see how that would be appealing to both the sender and he recipient. The uptake on social networks is also still growing so it looks likely that this trend is only likely to increase in the near future.

I think in the B2C market there is a high probablity that share to social will begin to completely replace forward to a friend, although I think they will always co-exist to give the user the choice – and also to cater for emails which by nature people would only want to share with one or two people and would not want to publisise on their Facebook wall or similar.

For the B2B market I suspect that forward to a friend will remain predominant – as businesses often have one persona on a social network and not one per employee. Sure employees are likely to use social networks, but often they want a seperation between their work and employed life. People do often have work twitter accounts though, and if tweeting continues to gain popularity I can see this being something which migth potentially tip the B2B scales away from forward to a friend.

An interesting idea. Thanks for the post.