A new study by Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for some of the biggest websites like Upworthy, said their research shows that many people aren’t reading articles that they retweet.
Josh Schwartz, Chartbeat’s lead data scientist said that “Facebook shares would reflect the same pattern.”
Upworthy says they have found that web visitors who consume about 25% of an article are more likely to share it on social media than people who moved onto to something else. They also found that people who read the entire article are even more likely to share it on social media.
"There is obviously a correlation between number of tweets and total volume of traffic that goes to an article," Schwartz says. "But just not a relationship between stories that are most heavily consumed and stories that are most heavily tweeted."
Over at Buzzfeed they found that social media shares occur by users who have spent 3.5 minutes on a page on a desktop computer, or over 2 minutes on a mobile device.
I’m not surprised by this data. There is just too much information to consume on the web these days so it’s impossible for people to read it all. Plus people tend to skim on the web, especially with the rise of mobile devices.
It’s alarming that so many people are sharing articles with friends, colleagues, and strangers when they barely read the articles. It’s even more disturbing when you factor in that Nielsen’s research shows that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family.
If social shares and pageviews shouldn’t be your main source of measurement what should you be measuring?