Твитнуть не читая

The Verge публикует любопытную подборку данных нескольких сайтов с большим количеством трафика из социальных сетей, по которой явно напрашивается неожиданный вывод — достаточно большая часть аудитории лайкает или твитит статью, даже не прочитав ее:

Chartbeat’s lead data scientist Josh Schwartz later clarified to The Verge that Haile was talking specifically about tweets, although the expectation is that Facebook shares would reflect the same pattern. While greater social media shares clearly increase the amount of traffic to an article, that doesn’t necessarily mean that more people will actually read it.

«There is obviously a correlation between number of tweets and total volume of traffic that goes to an article,» he says. «But just not a relationship between stories that are most heavily consumed and stories that are most heavily tweeted.»

But the most obvious explanation, the one that has probably already occurred to you because you’re just as guilty as everyone else, is that people are tweeting stories without reading them. «I skim hundreds of stories on a daily basis for my job, and yes a portion of those I definitely tweet without actually reading,» says Taylor Lorenz, who runs social media for The Daily Mail. «I think anyone who says they fully read and ponder every article before tweeting is lying through their teeth.»

Like Chartbeat, Upworthy measures things like scroll depth, clicks, video playback, and other metrics in order to determine whether people are actually reading. Upworthy’s data supports the false-retweet theory: users who consume about 25 percent of an article are more likely to share than users who immediately bounced away or even users who spent more time with it.

(Upworthy)

But there’s more to the story. While Upworthy sees a burst of tweets from people who have consumed just a quarter of the article, it sees an ever greater boost once people have consumed the whole thing. BuzzFeed’s data-science team had similar findings: the majority of social media shares happen after people have been on a page for over three and a half minutes on desktop, or over two minutes on a mobile device.

So if you see someone tweet an article, it likely means they either didn’t really read it, or they read every word. (выделение моё)

Вообще, я довольно часто вижу, как лайки и ретвиты появляются в течение считанных минут после отправки статьи. Еще ярче эта картина выглядит с подкастами — редкий выпуск подкаста обходится без лайка в течение первых 10-15 минут после публикации, хотя его продолжительность может быть и час, и два.

А вы лайкаете статью, не прочтя ее?