I’ve been thinking about social media shares lately.
I take Google at their word when they say social shares don’t influence search engine rankings.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, it makes sense to me. A lot of sense.
Links require review and approval. Links often require one-on-one interaction.
And links take time and energy to add to a website.
Shares, on the other hand, just require the mindless act of clicking the ‘share’ button.
Links require engagement, whereas shares definitely do not.
The Sordid Truth about Sharing
For example: imagine you are passionate about sharks. You think shark finning is a horrendous practice, and you want to do everything you can to stop it.
Those sharks are slaughtered en masse for their fins, which are then made into soup. The sharks are either thrown back into the ocean without their fins to drown or killed and discarded.
If shark finning is a subject you care about, you will share every article and study about it that comes your way.
You want your friends, peers, coworkers and family to share your passion. Oftentimes, you don’t even read the content before you share it.
You might share a poorly written blog or a report with half-baked research.
You just read the title, it appeals to your interests and emotions, and you share it.
It bolsters your passion, and you feel good about the share. And then, you forget about it.
In a piece for Time, Tony Haile of Chartbeat wrote:
“A widespread assumption is that the more content is liked or shared, the more engaging it must be, the more willing people are to devote their attention to it. However, the data doesn’t back that up. We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.
When we combined attention and traffic to find the story that had the largest volume of total engaged time, we found that it had fewer than 100 likes and fewer than 50 tweets. Conversely, the story with the largest number of tweets got about 20% of the total engaged time that the most engaging story received.”
We are all guilty of this. We have all shared content without reading it, just because its title or headline is sensational and appeals to us. We’ll probably never go back and seriously read the content, either. It’s hard to admit, but it is a crime nearly all of us have committed.
In fact, I’ve even seen popular blogs that have both a ‘share’ and a ‘read’ counter and have noticed, numerous times, the ‘share’ counter number is higher than the ‘read’ counter number. The internet in action, ladies and gentlemen.
Links are different, because they require more engagement. They require effort and, in the case of link builders, they require human communication.
There’s no correlation between backlinks and shares, because they don’t have that common engagement factor.
Keeping Tony Haile’s research and writing in mind, let’s look at a study from Moz and BuzzSumo:
The Numbers
Moz and BuzzSumo studied over one million pieces of content. They looked at shares, likes and links.
If you have ever tried to build links, you know how unnatural it is for those “naturally earned links” to roll in. You know link building requires outreach.
Thinking about how much real work link building is, it probably won’t surprise you to learn most content doesn’t have any links.
Even if your content is useful, expertly crafted, and targeted at the right audience, building links and gaining engagement is tough.
From Moz and BuzzSumo’s report:
“The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In a randomly selected sample of 100,000 posts, over 50% had 2 or less Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments), and over 75% had zero external links. This suggests there is a lot of very poor content out there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content.
When we looked at a bigger sample of 750,000 well shared posts, we found over 50% of these posts still had zero external links. Thus, suggests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cases large numbers of shares, they find it far harder to acquire links.”
Shares are easier to come by than links, because shares are frictionless. Think of the last piece of content you shared on social media– did you link to it? Probably not.
And on the flip side of the coin, would you link to something without thoroughly reading it to make sure it’s relevant and up to your standards? Absolutely not.
The Engagement Disparity
If you’re active on Twitter, you have noticed some strange activity. Accounts with strange names retweet and favorite your tweets. Accounts with seemingly randomly-generated buzzword phrases, in place of a real bio, follow you. Those spambot accounts share all sorts of content.
Mindless sharing, by both bots and people, are rampant.
From a follow-up post on Moz/BuzzSumo’s research:
“It turns out a ton of things that people share socially on the Web, they don’t read at all. They may click Retweet. They may even include the URL. They might share it on Facebook. But they, themselves, may never have even visited that content. Sounds crazy, but I bet you’ve done it. I bet I’ve done it. I bet I’ve been like well, you know, it was probably a good edition of Whiteboard Friday, I’ll go share it out, having not yet watched the video and seen whether I did a good job or not. That’s just the way of the Web…
… So you can see lots of things with social shares not performing well. But once they start to get engagement and start to earn links from that engagement, now they’re suddenly ranking.”
Engagement is not equal to sharing. Engagement requires someone to read the content, think about it, and decide if it’s valuable. Actually valuable. If they are engaged, they will leave a thoughtful comment. If they run a relevant website, they might decide it is valuable for their audience and link to it.
The report reveals the kinds of content that gain links are usually pieces with real research behind them (and, predictably, list posts), like news or investigative journalism.
They’re inherently valuable. Much like I’m linking to Moz and BuzzSumo’s research, bloggers and webmasters link to those pieces of content.
How to Get Links
You probably don’t have the power of a huge news outlet behind you. So, how do you get those links when so much other content gets neither links nor shares?
Once again, it boils down to engagement.
Even if you have great content that is deserving of links, you have to go out and do the legwork to ask for links, or your content will end up like hundreds of thousands of other blog posts, doomed to a life without links.
When you are asking a blogger or a webmaster to consider linking to your content, you are engaging them in conversation. If your outreach is good, they will check out your website or blog post. If it is relevant, and if it is a good fit, they will become engaged, and if it is right for their audience, they will reward you with a link.
If you do the link building process right, you are creating engagement– and links require engagement.
Sharing is effortless. No time, little thought, and just a click of a button. Social shares are nice, but they don’t drive search engine rankings.
If you want to start ranking your website, it’s up to you to create that engagement and start earning links.
Comments
David – you know I have great respect for you. Your points are valid, as are the Moz/BuzzSumo study’s findings. However, there is a huge disconnect between the study and use of Twitter for one to one outreach. Most people think of social as one-to-many, or many-to-many, and yes this is the surface allure. However, I can tell you from personal client experience that if you use social as a means to identify clusters of influencers within a specific topic, and even better, the actual curator of a resouurce/links guide, you can in fact use Twitter to begin the process of introducing content/URLs, whcih then, based on the curator’s discretion, can become links on that resource page. Six years ago I wrote “Riding The Twitter Link Waves”. It has more on this topic and might be worth a read. I wont link drop here, just search for “Riding The Twitter Link Waves”.
Thanks for stopping in Eric and great point. I’m all for using Twitter as a means for outreach and to engage people one on one, which is an amazing strategy as you outlined. I was just trying to give a little perspective why shares alone aren’t a ranking factor, since looking at the raw number of shares is an inaccurate way to gauge how many people are actually engaged in your content. I’m definitely going to check out your article!
Interesting take, David, but I could not disagree more. I’m one of those people. The writers who might link to your content. I don’t link to everything I share, that would be crazy. I share politics, humor, art, and quirky stories that interest me – in addition to marketing and social media related posts.
Twitter often help me choose subjects to write about (questions people ask, topics for marketing chats, the discussions that spark a lot of dissent, things people share). I bookmark authoritative posts in a resource folder and refer to the folder every day.
I link to three types of things:
Original research, like the Moz study you referenced above.
In-depth posts that tie several concepts together or bring a new idea to the table.
Authoritative authors and industry blogs.
In addition, I often ask for quotes on a specific subject, and include a link that helps identify the person.
Bottom line: I don’t link to everything I share, but for me, Twitter is an invaluable discovery tool, and I do frequently link to content I discover there. I’ve linked to the same report you mentioned several times…and I discovered it when Moz tweeted it out.
Thanks for stopping in Sherry and I appreciate your thoughtful comment, but I don’t believe we are disagreeing. I think it’s awesome to use Twitter to discover content ideas or share stuff with your followers and my point was not at all to discredit all of the invaluable uses of Twitter.
I was just coming to explain why in many cases share counts are an inaccurate portrayal of how much someone is actually engaged or even read your content. I understand that there are MANY people like you who wouldn’t share unworthy content, and in theory if everyone would share the way you do, then it would be a completely different story.
But since MINDLESS sharing is indeed rampant that would outweigh all the good sharing that’s going on and therefore isn’t a reliable metric to base ranking factors off of.
Hi David,
Great post. I share contents on twitter most especially if
1. They are by people I like
2. People I want to engage with
or if the post strikes a cord with me in any way. Despite all this, 90% of the post I have shared, I have never read but I have read 99% of the post I have ever linked to.
Glad you enjoyed Niyi.
I appreciate your honesty and for backing up what I’m saying!
Wonderful insights about elaborating links roll in and the social sharing concept and how search engine count and take social media as a ranking factor.
I just would like to pick the point links roll in, which you erase to prove social sharing factor dead is quite interesting, in your point of view. But that search engine does count social media yet. Yes! You can not say no, isn’t it?
I must say your way of writing and knowledge spreading is appreciable. Now Links roll in is no doubt very helpful in order to gain engagement,authenticity and search engine consider this factor in its positive map. Here one main point you need to think about social sharing, which will clear you my point of comment. Social sharing is still ranking factor, but search engine count just 5% of all ranking factors. Someone may ask why? Here are two thing which you have mentioned
1- Bot sharing
2- Fake Account sharing
These are the Spam signal for search engine, because of most probable chances, which may lead search engine users to wrong search results but main thing to authenticate your content is only possible, if you spread and place your written material to social media channels, social bookmarking channels and after that by link building, to authentic and relevant websites.
Suppose you think you have done a great job by clearing this phenomena “Shares Don’t Equal Engagement, But Links Do”. The next step is what? you will show it to more audience by posting it to authentic website, but how someone would share or roll in link to their website, same as you mentioned about MOZ etc.? In my point of view by only social sharing, your content get exposure, critics, attention, interest and engagement, when it comes appear in different communities. Who care what search engine have worth this task. Its visitor and interested visitor. Search engine is serving its users, you serve your users through any channel. There is no other channel and medium to reach and target interested audience except social media. So do not take it so easy as zombie.
Thanks for stopping in Mirza and good point about focusing and connecting with your target audience via social media.
You are always welcome David. Its all your way of elaboration, which arise this point.
Hi David,
What am amazing post!
Well written piece!
Sharing is caring no doubt, but a poorly written Piece sharing is a mere time waste of the person shares as well as others.
I like the shark exmaple story, yes the chain works well.
Altogether a great information.
This is my first visit here.
Will come again
Keep writing.
Best regards
~Philip
Hey Philip, I appreciate the kind words and look forward to hearing from you again 🙂
Engagement is key. I always emphasize, you can write great content, but unless you put it in front of people no one is going to see it. Once you create some excellent content, send it out, share it on different platforms, let people know you’ve written something. If it really is compelling people will link to it.
Well explained article. Thanks for sharing the knowledge.
Well explained article on the unique signal of links. Thanks for sharing, David!