Welcome to the Social Sharing Benchmarks Report! Each month, we dive into the data from our social sharing A/B testing platform. Using information from hundreds of experiments performed on our platform in September 2017, we now have this month’s benchmarks for post-action social sharing that organizations can use to evaluate their own digital programs. We update this data monthly, so you can check out the reports from August and July, and stay tuned for October’s report!

DATA AND METHODS

All of the data from this analysis comes from the ShareProgress A/B testing platform. The platform allows organizations to create post-action share pages to send supporters to after the supporters take some sort of online action, such as signing a petition. The platform allows organizations to make several versions of the social sharing text that appears once a supporter shares. This way, they can run A/B tests to find the language that drives the most viral visits to the original action page. The data is recorded in our back-end database that powers the site. We limited the analysis to September 2017. During this month, there was a total of 1.6 million visits to ShareProgress share pages.

BENCHMARKS

Share Rate

Of the 1,571,354 share page visitors, 520,045 people shared resulting in a share rate of 33%.

• 16% of visitors shared on Facebook
• 14% of visitors shared via Email
• 3% of visitors shared on Twitter

Viral Visits

A viral visit is when a supporter visits the original action page by clicking on a link that another supporter posted on social media or email. 783,197 viral visits came through social sharing on the ShareProgress platform in July, meaning for every post-action share, there were 1.51 viral visits.

Viral Actions

A viral action occurs when a viral visitor to an action page submits an action. For every post-action share, there were 0.68 viral actions. On average, for every 100 people that take action, they will bring in 23 more viral actions.

Successful Shares

Successful shares are post-action social shares that drive at least one viral action. 25% of all social shares were successful.

TRENDS OVER TIME

We’ve been tracking share stats for a while now, and it has revealed some interesting patterns.

First, there can be big changes month-to-month in the number of first generation visits to our share pages. We think this is largely due to variation in the number of large email campaigns that organizations’ run.

The share rate has remained very constant over time, so the number of shares has tracked closely with the number of non-viral actions. On the other hand, viral visits and viral actions do not track as closely with shares. This is probably because the number of viral visits and viral actions are heavily dependent on what campaigns are being run, since some campaigns drive a lot of viral activity, and some do not.