In recent years, social media has undoubtedly upgraded its role in the daily lives of its users to a huge extent. In their initial stages, both Facebook and other, lesser-known, social media focused on online contact between their users. However, the explosion in the number of accounts essentially forced them to reshape their role in social life. In addition to their original role, they have now also taken on the role of… informant.
The most striking proof can be found on the Facebook homepage. The News feed, or “News Feed”, which appears at the top of the page clearly shows the new role of social media. Each newspaper, magazine, website has its own profile. Accordingly, each user selects what they like and places them in their “News Feed”, thus shaping the way they will be informed about current events.
Given this, if someone sees a particular article being shared frequently on their homepage, they should conclude that it is a widely read and discussed text. The paradox of social media, however, comes to contradict this obvious and logical sequence of thoughts. Contrary to what we assume, the many shares an article may have are not at all related to its readability.
According to statistical studies, Facebook and Twitter users do not… take into account their friends' shares at all. Their choice to read an article is based purely on personal choice. The eight shares and one tweet that correspond, as the research supports, to 100 "hits", have almost no impact on the article's overall traffic.
In a total of 10,000 articles with a large number of shares, low readability rates are observed. Of course, there are articles that combine many shares and many hits. The "successful" texts that manage to gain impressions stand out in each sector. On the other hand, most texts, although they have been shared, have not attracted the interest of many users. This element also shapes the diagram that follows.
The element that separates shares from “hits” is evident. Articles with few shares appear to have fairly high traffic rates. On the contrary, few articles combine hits and shares. Social media users, it seems, focus on reading and not on dissemination, which contradicts the basic characteristics of social media that rely on self-promotion to a fairly large extent.
Look at the strange chart, with notifications shown on the vertical axis and hits on the horizontal:
