February 16, 2014
Sharing without really caring
This is a little scary for anyone who has cheered the large number of retweets received by an article. From The Verge:
Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for sites like Upworthy, dropped a bomb: “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading,”
Entire careers have been built on promoting social media — and now we find out that many people are retweeting stuff they haven’t even read? This may not be entirely new behaviour, though. Many times people have told me that they leaf through a newspaper reading only the headlines.
And there is still hope for tweets. Studies have also found that people are more likely to link to an article if they have read it all the way through. It seems to be all or nothing, and a new metric called “attention minutes” may help us understand this phenomenon. Be sure to read the whole article to learn more.