Recently, YouTube began actively promoting its new Autoshare feature to its registered users, a feature which can instantly publish an update to Facebook, Twitter or Google Reader whenever a user rates, favorites, or comments on a video.

For companies with a lot of YouTube activity like Next New Networks (on average, we get over 2,000 comments and 6,000 ratings and favorites each day), we’re likely to be seeing our videos there embedded on Facebook and linked on Twitter much more than ever before, and we’re already seeing a pickup. Take our “Lord Gaga” parody video, released last night, which amassed 200,000 views in its first 24 hours and is one of YouTube’s top 10 most viewed videos of the day.

According to bit.ly, the video was linked over 90 times on Twitter and shared on over 1000 Facebook pages, and a quick scan shows that 1 out of every 4 of the Twitter links came from YouTube active sharing, meaning we’ve gotten about a 33% gain in linkage from the feature than we might otherwise have had. It’s too early to tell how much total increase viewership this is leading to, although we’ve found Facebook embeds and Twitter links often contribute up to 50% of the critical early traffic within the first 8 hours that helps break a viral video, getting them in front of blogs and Popular or Most Viewed sctions of video sites.

Two other breakout videos from yesterday, Muppet Studios’ Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody and Boing Boing Video’s video game character wedding showed a different percentage according to bit.ly—with less than 5% of their tweets coming from Active Sharing—but this may reflect that the videos seemed to get much more of their views via blog embeds, where they went viral in many top blogs, than direct viewing from YouTube’s site.

YouTube isn’t the first video platform with active sharing—Boxee, for instance, has this feature in their Alpha release, and Tumblr and Facebook can automatically publish a YouTube user’s feed and activity. But with YouTube making up the lion’s share of online video viewing and sharing, active sharing just took a huge step forward.

The question is, is this the beginning of a trend, and will more video platforms implement auto-sharing features with Twitter and Facebook Connect? Depending on how users react, it could be a great step forward, or a feature that adds more noise in social media—we’re sure there’s some fine-tuning to come.