Does Social Media Engagement Increase Content Readership? This Reports Suggests No

One of the biggest trends that has been taking the world of social media by storm for the past year or so has been the shift away from posting. People are more likely to message each other than might have been the case otherwise, and the social media feed itself has started to fade away to a great extent. This might be due to the reason that people are concerned that their old posts might end up influencing their lives at a later date.

It is important to note that the lack of social media engagement might not have all that much of an impact on the amount of readers your content might receive, as per Memo study. What this basically means is that regardless of how many times your post ends up getting shared on social media, readership is not going to be influenced to all that great of an extent. In fact, according to the Memo report, despite the increase in social media shares and comments, there is no definitive correlation between social engagement and actual readership of news articles.

Another way to look at it is like this. A post might get lots of comments and likes, but these users are not actually reading the content in question. As a result of the fact that this is the case, it’s no surprise that the prioritization of engagement is at an all-time low. Of course, this doesn’t mean that posting on social media is completely and utterly useless.

Quite on the contrary, brand awareness is still important. But at the same time, posting on social media doesn’t really bring the advantages so many seem to think it does. It might be a far sight better to simply try your level best to write content that is actually good, and this will result in you being able to get the readership that you desire.

Another data point that might contextualize what is being discussed at this current point in time is the number of links being shared through Direct Messages. This is where all of the posts are going, and it would be interesting to see what this data looks like and what type of effect it has on readership. Additionally, the Memo report also found that despite there being more positive coverage in their article sample, social engagement was higher per article among negative articles, suggesting that negative stories tend to generate more engagement online, further emphasizing the complexity of online interactions and content consumption trends.


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