One of the ways to find out about the popularity of your content is to know how many people share it with others. Social sharing is one of the ways our content distribution is boosted.

Econsultancy writer Kevin Gibbons has shared some statistics on how more than 87% of marketers fail to track their content’s sharing.

Gibbons says, “Traditional analytics tracks shares via social methods, but the reality is that a large chunk of sharing is happening not on public forums like Facebook and Twitter, but privately via messaging, emails, or chat apps.

Moreover, this private messaging is facilitated by one of the simplest sharing methods in internet history: copy-and-paste direct from the URL address bar.

It can be easy to get obsessed by the number of social shares a piece of content receives. However, the problem is that people often judge the success of content by social vanity metrics, and not by real impact.

When I’m writing, I see it as a greater success if people are engaging with the content by sharing it around their teams internally over email, Slack etc – as then it’s a strong indicator that it’s resonating with the target audience. This often doesn’t look as impressive publicly, but the content is hitting KPIs/goals that really matter”.

Why marketers are failing to track 87% of their content shares

Sharing is caring