Research by the analytics company Searchmetrics has found that StumbleUpon and Facebook appear to be the top social media tools for linking to national newspaper websites.

The research looked at how often content from 12 national newspaper sites was shared on six social networking and bookmarking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Google) in the ten weeks up to 24 October.

Unsurprisingly, Mail Online topped the table with an average 2,908,779 links a week followed by The Guardian with 2,587,258, while The Times website, which is behind a paywall, came last with just 256 links.