Before Christmas, Neil blogged about how we’d introduced social sharing buttons as an experiment to four of our content types.

Now we’ve had the chance to look at the first 10 weeks of data, we wanted to report back.

Why we added social sharing buttons to GOV.UK

Many departments' former sites had buttons that let users easily share content to Twitter or Facebook or other social sharing sites. Several mourned their loss in the transition to GOV.UK.

Based on our previous experience with Directgov and other government sites, we did have doubts about how much these buttons would be used in practice (there are some interesting comments about this on our previous post). Also, it wasn’t a feature that had been particularly requested by end users.

Nevertheless, it was one of the things that we and colleagues from the Government Communications Service wanted to try out and evaluate.

Our findings

We’ve recently looked at data covering the period 3 December 2013 to 17 February 2014, roughly the first 10 weeks of the social sharing buttons being live on GOV.UK.

From the figures, it’s fair to say that the introduction of sharing buttons didn’t exactly set the world alight. Overall sharing rates using the buttons are pretty low, way less than 1 percent.

The introduction of sharing buttons on GOV.UK didn’t exactly set the world alight

However, there is evidence that social sharing buttons can be substantially more useful for people using mobile phones than on desktops; and - as you might guess - that some types of content are more popular than others for sharing.

Social sharing figures across GOV.UK formats

During the time period we analysed, GOV.UK URLs were shared a total of 14,078 times to Facebook and Twitter using our sharing buttons - that’s 0.2% of the total of 6.8 million pageviews.

Overall, our social sharing rate was 0.2%

News articles were by far our most viewed content format - for these, the average sharing rate was also 0.2%.

Consultations were the least shared format overall, with only 0.06% of total users using our sharing buttons.

Section Pageviews Social media shares Shares as percentage of page views News 4,841,716 9,994 0.21% World location pages 330,112 1,904 0.58% Speeches 636,689 1,531 0.24% Consultations 1,041,264 649 0.06% Total 6,849,781 14,078 0.21%

Subject matter influences news sharing

Within these broad content types, the extent to which a particular page was shared was largely dependent on its subject matter. There wasn’t always a direct relationship between how much a page was viewed, and how often it was shared.

This can be seen by looking at sharing rates for the five most popular news stories in the period, sharing rates for which vary between 0.18% and 1.6%.

It’s interesting to see, by the way, that these most popular stories are straightforward, factual, explanations of changes to government schemes, or report significant data releases.

For speeches and consultations, sharing rates for the most popular content items were roughly comparable:

sharing rates for the most-shared speech - Nick Clegg’s speech on mental health - were 1.3% of its 3,538 pageviews

most-shared consultation was the one on public libraries, for which sharing rates were 1.8% of its 4033 pageviews.

Mobile users can be twice as likely to share - if the content's right

Broadly, we found mobile phone users and desktop users equally likely to use the social sharing buttons, as demonstrated by our breakdown of people sharing news stories:

Device Category Total social media shares Total visits Percentage sharing by device Desktop 6,366 1,694,874 0.38% Mobile 2,560 649,337 0.39% Tablet 1,068 323,487 0.33%

However, for some individual news items, mobile users proved much more likely to share.

For example, on the Direct debit and abolition of the tax disc page, twice as many mobile users clicked on our social sharing buttons than desktop users (0.75% to 0.33%)

Pageviews of tax disc news page Social media shares Shares as a percentage of page views Desktop 30,245 101 0.33% Mobile 15,084 113 0.75% Tablet 8,354 34 0.41%

Similarly, on the news article on the death on Mandela, 2.2 percent of mobile users used our social sharing buttons, compared to 1.3 percent of desktop users.

There are a number of possible reasons for this - for example, the time of day that news stories are posted; or that an intrinsic 'shareability' of particular stories being suited more to mobile audiences. We'll need to do a bit more digging to find out.

Facebook and Twitter

Facebook was generally more popular than Twitter as a place to share GOV.UK content:

Section Pageviews Twitter shares Facebook shares News 4,841,716 4,689 5,305 World location pages 330,112 534 1,370 Speeches 636,689 862 669 Consultations 1,041,264 338 311 Total 6,849,781 6,423 7,655

The news about tax disc abolition was shared by 10 times as many people on Facebook than on Twitter

In fact, for our most popular news story, the abolition of tax discs, 10 times as many people chose to share on Facebook than Twitter using our sharing buttons.

What next

There’s patently more data we could be looking at here.

For example, we need to compare the rates for numbers of people who choose to use GOV.UK sharing buttons with the numbers of people sharing content items in general.

We also need to benchmark our social sharing rates against similar figures from other sites (does anyone have any comparative data they can share?); and do some A/B testing on the positioning of the buttons.

But notwithstanding that, from what we’ve seen so far, our users aren’t exactly demonstrating an overwhelming case for us retaining social sharing buttons - at least on desktops.

[Image by mkhmarketing, used under creative commons]

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