More people are ‘Liking’ or sharing shopping items or links with their social media followers than forwarding them to friends via email, recent research shows.

A Responsys study of top online retailers finds that their use of ‘email-to-a-friend’ or ‘forward-to-a-friend’ via email has declined 15 percent since 2009, while the use of buttons and links enabling consumers to share with their social media network has increased by 12 percent.

When it comes to the most popular categories among daily deal website users, florists, malls, restaurants and day spas top the list, according to Scarborough Research.

According to Scarborough Research, local businesses most likely to benefit from targeting daily deal site users are restaurants, general retail stores, local specialty stores, health and fitness businesses, and automotive repair and servicing businesses.

Research from Slingshot SEO indicates that the top spot on the organic listings on Google gets 18.2 percent of all click-throughs, while the second spot gets 10.05 percent and the third position gets 7.22 percent.

Diverging from a recent study by Optify which indicates that the top spot yields 36.4 percent of clicks (http://www.kikabink.com/news/top-spot-on-google-gets-36-percent-of-clicks/) – Slingshot SEO’s ‘Mission ImposSERPble: Establishing Google Click-Through Rates’ research is based on a 6 month study.

One in five U.S. consumers (22 percent) are using digital media such as email, text messaging and Internet sites to get household coupons to help them save money on products and services.

Despite the popularity of online coupons, however, they aren’t the most popular source of savings coupons. Not yet, anyway. In fact, Scarborough Research finds that Sunday newspapers are the most popular source of household coupons, followed by retailers themselves and good old fashioned mail.

comScore, Inc’s 50 most popular U.S. websites for July 2011 shows Google sites accounting for the most traffic, followed by Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL.

In detail, the top 50 U.S. website properties, along with their monthly estimated unique visitors for July 2011 are as follows:

In a sign that online advertising has truly gone mainstream, eMarketer estimates that retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) will account for the biggest share of new U.S. online advertising spending in 2011.

Overall, the research firm forecasts online advertising to grow by 20.2 percent to reach $31.3 billion this year. Retail already accounts for the biggest share of online advertising and is expected to grow by 24 percent to reach $6.78 billion. The CPG industry will grow by 14 percent to reach $2.46 million in total online ad spending.

Here’s more ‘mixed evidence’ over the benefits of daily deal sites for local businesses. July 2011 research reveals that while nearly two-thirds of U.S. businesses had run a profitable promotion on daily deal site, Groupon, 82 percent were unhappy with the level of repeat business generated by the promotion.

The research, conducted by Cooper Murphy Copywriters, also found that while only 35 percent did not make money from their Groupon promotion, most noted that Groupon users were more price-sensitive than the average customer. All in all, out of the survey of 300 businesses:

The number of mobile social network users is expected to grow from 1.1 billion worldwide in 2011 to 1.9 billion by 2016, representing a cumulative annual growth rate of 11.8 percent over the next 5 years.

Based on research from Visiongain, the outlook for mobile social networking is positive as market players and users alike experience changes in monetization models, fervent competition between vendors, and localization trends.

Online retail sales reached $37.5 billion in the second quarter of 2011, an increase of 14 percent over Q2 2010, according to comScore.

The rise in ecommerce spending represents the seventh consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth and the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth.

Consumers not only read online reviews before visiting local businesses, but they form their ‘first impressions’ of such businesses based on such online reviews.

Research by RatePoint shows that 76 percent of consumers read online reviews before buying from a company they’ve never used before. Meanwhile, 81 percent look for online reviews before engaging local businesses that provide in-home services.