The Death of Sharing Content

In the world of public relations, the amount of engagement you get on social media outlets has been the primary means of getting people to see your content. However, as an article on Forbes points out, the amount of shares on social media is dropping drastically. There are many potential contributing factors to the sudden drop in social media sharing such as, changes in the algorithms used by social media platforms to determine what content is pushed to the top of timelines, or an over saturation of information and articles being generated. The world of social media is constantly changing so the current downward trend may not stay the same, but it is important for people running social media to be flexible in the strategies they use to distribute their content. Sticking with the same strategy for social media is one of the worst things you can do, the Forbes article points out, if you used the same strategy as 3 years ago, your strategy would be 50% less effective. The sheer quantity of content put out on social media every day is playing a major role in the decrease in content being shared. Whenever an important event occurs there is an extreme amount of content produced in a short period of time covering the same story so people don't need to share the content because something they are following has put out the content already. The amount of sharing and engagement may not be the best way anymore to determine how successful the content you are creating is, instead the amount of people who view your content may be a better indicator. Finding other ways of sharing content may also be necessary if the amount of people you are reaching and the effectiveness of your content is suffering.  For publishers, making your content searchable on google has recently proven to be a better source for getting traffic than through social media. The Forbes article points out that in less than a year Facebook went from being the number one source of traffic to publishers sites to google being the source of nearly twice as much traffic over Facebook. Understanding where you are getting the bulk of your engagement and how you are getting traffic to your created content will allow you to focus on your energy effectively. If you are not seeing as much interaction on your social media, maybe lessen the amount of content you are creating and instead focus on creating higher quality content.  Youtube videos and political content have shown to be the two things which have not seen the dramatic decrease in the amount of engagement they have seen. So, one thing to consider is changing the form of content you are distributing, if Youtube is not being affected by the decrease in engagement maybe Youtube would be a good way to share content.