The social media landscape is shifting. Platforms are adjusting algorithms to de-prioritize news in an effort to combat the spread of misinformation. While social media used to be seen as the pulse of consumer interest, comms teams today know that it’s not the end-all-be-all. We decided to do some research across a variety of social listening platforms to understand where we stand today.
Just how much has changed? What’s the real correlation between social media engagement and actual consumer interest? What’s its correlation with news consumption? In 2022, we published research comparing social engagement and article readership. With the shifting social landscape, we revisited that research, analyzing 26,000 news articles published from Jan. 20 – Feb. 20, 2024 across various topics and industries, to see where we stand today. Keep reading to find what we learned.
Social engagement data gives no indication of how many people actually read an article.
We examined the correlation coefficient between social engagement (total reactions, comments, and shares) and readership (unique visitors to news articles). For context, a perfect positive correlation is 1 and 0 is no correlation. Across all the articles and topics we analyzed, we found the correlation coefficient between social engagement and readership is 0.17–no clear connection between social engagement and actual readers of the news. On top of that, for the majority of news, less than 1% of readers (article traffic) comes from social media.
In a crisis, the correlation between social media engagement and readers reaches moderate at best.
In most industries we looked at, correlation hovered around or below 0.1. There are just three categories where correlation creeped towards the low end of moderate: Politics, Sports & Athletics, and Crises (which includes incidents like a mass shooting and a major brand crisis). All three topics see the largest volume of chatter and readers. Politics earned a correlation of 0.33, Sports & Athletics a 0.36, and Crises a 0.49.
What should we learn from this? Trust, but verify, is a good motto in a crisis. Social chatter can be a moderate indicator of negative attention, but it’s better to also to verify how many people are actually reading the news cycle so you can respond (or not respond) accordingly.
Like we see in readership, negative articles tend to see higher social engagement.
Despite there being more positive coverage in our article sample, social engagement was higher per article among negative articles. The internet loves negativity. Shocking. All jokes aside, that does track with the finding that social engagement is moderately (0.49) correlated to real readers for crisis news.
TL;DR
When it comes to extending the reach of your coverage, social media is undoubtedly offering diminishing returns. Furthermore, social media engagement is absolutely not a reliable indication of people engaging in news. While it’s moderately correlated for crisis news, it’s likely not worth betting your brand’s reputation on a 0.49 correlation score.