Sharing branded content on StumbleUpon greatly increases its half life, extending its chances of winning engagement, according to a report from Simply Zesty.

Businesses sharing content on social media forums should consider adding bookmarking site StumbleUpon to their marketing mix. A new study shows the platform greatly increases the half life of of content to 400 hours on average, Simply Zesty reported.

The half life of social content is a metric related to its sharing developed by Bit.ly, Brafton reported last month. The figure represents the amount of time it takes for a link to receive half of the engagement it will ever garner. The longer-than-average half life StumbleUpon offers content is likely the reason that the site is responsible for driving more than half of social traffic across the web (50.34 percent).

According to Simply Zesty, the half life of a link shared on Twitter is 2.8 hours, and it is slightly more than three hours for shared Facebook content. While both the microblogging site and the social giant offer valuable sharing opportunities, these half lives pale in comparison to the half life afforded on StumbleUpon. Moreover, the average page view length on StumbleUpon is 72 seconds compared to 23 to seconds on Facebook.

StumbleUpon has recently pushed itself as a platform for social media marketing after surpassing the 2 million-user mark. Brafton reported earlier this month that a majority of the growth has taken place in the last year; as such, marketers who start using the platform now might still win early adopters’ advantages in spite of the fact that the site has existed for some time.

Joe Meloni is Brafton's former Executive News and Content Writer. He studied journalism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has written for a number of print and web-based publications.