3 Steps to Jump-Start Your Share Message Conversion

This often-overlooked metric matters more than you think

By: 
July 19, 2014

There is an important social engagement metric that is often overlooked – how many people who start to share your content actually follow through with the share.

On average, 4 out of 10 people who click a social share button decide they don’t want to actually share. Each time this share conversion fails, you lose organic referral traffic.

So if you have a blog post with 10,000 unique visits and 200 people click the share button for that post, only 120 of those people may actually complete the share. The 80 failed conversions will cost you 600 warm referral clicks if you’re averaging 5 referral clicks per successful share.

That would be like you lost nearly $200 in clicks if you were buying referral clicks at a $0.30 CPC via a distribution platform like OutBrain.

Ouch.

We have a few tips for boosting your share message follow through:

  •    Don’t put too many words in your user’s mouth - Remember, when a user shares your content, they are providing a soft endorsement. If the message is too dull, “salesy”, radical, etc. you will see fewer people follow through with the share.  
  •    Test different messages - It’s hard to know exactly what will resonate most with your audience. Experimenting with different text and images is key to discovering the best message.  
  •    Use the right content for the right social network - Each network has a different voice and content structure, so a message that worked great on Facebook typically won’t do as great on Twitter and vice versa.  

Knowing your current follow through rate and testing different messages is hard, but we’ve made both easy with Naytev. We show you exactly how many times your given piece of content doesn’t get posted. We call failed share conversions, “Bails”.

As you can see in the example above, the first post was much more successful in terms of share follow through. The first post had a follow through of around 81% while the  second post only has a follow through rating of 47%. This metric can be an early indicator in how a social message will perform over time.

As you are trying to improve your outgoing social content, it is important to keep track of your share message follow through rate. It could be a key blocker of your content going viral.