New study from Echobox offers insights into the potential of content resharing on Facebook for publishers.
New research from Echobox found that despite content resharing on Facebook being a low-effort and high-value content promotion strategy, it remains underutilized by publishers. Echobox analyzed over 1.8 million Facebook shares to understand how publishers are resharing and the impact on their Facebook performance.
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Why Resharing Content on Facebook Is a Key Promotional Channel for Publishers?
The first significant finding of Echobox’s study was that resharing is an effective means of driving more clicks: on average, it received as an original share. For example, a post that receives 1,000 clicks upon initial publication would receive 670 new clicks as a reshare. This means publishers can easily boost a post’s clicks by 67% on average just by resharing it.
For 13% of publishers, a reshare will even outperform its original share, generating more than 100% of clicks the second time around:
As the data demonstrates, resharing has the power to drive a significant increase in clicks, extending an article’s reach and impact with minimal effort.
But the study also revealed something remarkable: publishers are only resharing a small portion of their content on average. Most publishers (55%) reshare less than 10% of their Facebook posts, and 2% of publishers do not reshare content at all.
This discrepancy between reshares’ effectiveness and the small amount of content currently being reshared highlights how under-exploited this valuable tactic remains.
There is an immense opportunity for all publishers to leverage their existing content to drive more reach, traffic, and engagement at no additional cost.
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The report, however, also notes that Facebook algorithms, audience behaviors, and content streams are always changing, so the proportion of reshares that works well today may not work well a week later. This ratio between new shares and reshares must therefore be monitored constantly. The manual exercise of measuring and adjusting reshares versus new shares should be repeated regularly.
The study also revealed that only 14% of total Facebook clicks currently originate from the sum of all reshares. The vast majority of publishers (80%) see less than a quarter of their total clicks come from reshares.
The large majority of publishers reshare their content within ten days on average, with 41% of publishers resharing their posts within 24 hours of the original share. Nonetheless, there is a notable long tail of publishers who reshare their Facebook posts several weeks after the original share.
Perhaps surprisingly, almost 10% of publishers reshare posts more than 50 days after their debut on Facebook. This means nearly 1 in 10 publishers are resharing content even months later to gain an additional push in clicks.
Echobox found that when deciding how often to reshare evergreen content, a critical consideration for publishers is the rate of audience growth. As the audience grows over time, a larger proportion of newer followers will not have seen the older shares. This is an excellent opportunity for publishers to engage recent followers with reshared content that will be entirely new for them. The faster their Facebook audience grows, the more often publishers may reshare evergreen content.
Another interesting revelation was that compared to any new share, reshares achieve substantial performance: they generate a whopping 71% of the clicks that any new share will generate. And for nearly a third of all publishers, reshares drive more traffic than all-new shares.
For the other 72% of publishers, there is a significant opportunity to increase the amount of Facebook traffic from reshares. The key is to optimize how resharing is done to maximize the performance of each reshare. Artificial intelligence can do this brilliantly and efficiently.
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Conclusion
Substantial traffic and engagement opportunities await publishers who do not yet reshare content on Facebook or who only reshare sporadically. Echobox’s research illustrates how intelligent resharing can generate considerable volumes of additional Facebook traffic for free, using content that publishers already have on hand. Yet publishers have still not tapped into this potential, only resharing 8% of their content on average.
While resharing should be a fundamental pillar of the social media strategy of all publishers, it is critical to remember that the ideal ratio of new shares to reshares will vary by publisher and by content and that this ratio can itself change over time. Similarly, the ideal articles and times to reshare will vary for each publisher and can fluctuate day to day and even hour to hour. Publishers must therefore take a tailored and data-driven approach when determining how much and which content to reshare, as well as when to reshare it.
It can be cumbersome and costly to calculate and analyze the data required to establish an optimal resharing strategy when done manually. The development of AI-based content-sharing solutions has come a long way. These solutions automatically optimize the proportion of reshares and the content and timing of all posts. Using a set of innovative algorithms, these solutions identify the best content to reshare and the best time to reshare it, ensuring that social content is always performing to its maximum potential.