The Social Media Index (or SMI) shows you how much traffic and engagement news publishers receive from social media each day
Percentage of social pageviews out of total pageviews
Engagements (like, comments, reshares) per social network per 10,000 followers
The SMI shows you the amount of traffic and engagement that publishers receive from social media every single day.
The importance of social media for news publishers is a hot topic. Yet there is no central repository that gives the public an insight into what social media actually means for publishers. Although there are existing analyses that try to convey this information, we believe the granularity and scope of the SMI is unmatched.
Data from reputable research organisations like Pew is valuable, but focuses mainly on the United States and is only updated every few months due to the cost and logistical challenges of high-quality opinion polls. Research centres like the Reuters Institute provide cross-country data on how people access content online, but this is only available on a yearly basis. And benchmarking solutions like SimilarWeb rely on small samples of data sets collected from internet users, which don't show accurate data.
Our data, however, is available on a daily basis, and it does not rely on self-reporting, which is known to create difficulties in a variety of fields within the social sciences. The SMI aggregates real-time analytics data collected from Echobox's collaboration with a few thousand publishers from an unrivalled number of countries and publications.
The SMI is the first of its kind, making it possible for anyone to easily identify trends, spot spikes and patterns in social-media generated traffic and engagement, and in many cases even identify their cause.
The first chart shows the percentage of pageviews from users who visit publishers' websites from social networks. The second chart shows the amount of engagement (e.g. likes, reshares, comments) per 10,000 followers for each social network.
The colours show you which social network was most important, and how the importance of each social network changed over time. Facebook has long been the dominant source of traffic, indicated by the grey area at the bottom. The red area indicates the amount of traffic added by X/Twitter. You can also export the data as a CSV-file to run your own analysis and produce your own visualisations.
To compile the SMI, we aggregate data of over a thousand different publishers from across the world - from London to LA and from Singapore to Buenos Aires - covering news, economics, business, tech, culture, science, entertainment and a wide variety of specialist subjects.
Anyone is permitted to use the SMI for personal, commercial or academic purposes. All we ask for is that you mention Echobox with a link back to either the SMI or our main website and/or add our logo (dark, bright, transparent dark or transparent bright).
We hope you will find this data as useful and fascinating as we do, and we hope that it will inspire passionate debate, thoughtful discussion and data-driven analysis for our time.
