Do press releases get shared on social media? What the numbers tell us.

Many attempts have been made to do away with the press release, but it refuses to die.

But is the press release a content format that lends itself to social media sharing?

Once again, I’ve turned to Buzzsumo to see what social sharing data can tell us.

Some caveats first.

For the purposes of this exercise, I’ve restricted the location to UK only.

I have also restricted this analysis to one press release distribution site – Cision’s prnewswire.co.uk (of course, there is prnewswire.com which has a far higher number of published releases. But as far as I can see many of these are for US only consumption. It is to be assumed that releases on prnewswire.co.uk are intended primarily for the UK market). I fully appreciate there are many other press release distribution sites out there. But as far as I can see, PR Newswire UK is almost certainly the largest by volume of releases distributed in the UK and therefore provides a reasonably representative sample of the overall UK press release distribution sector.

So what do the numbers tell us?

TL:DR Most press releases don't get shared on social media

According to Buzzsumo, over the last 12 months, there were a total of around 3120 PR Newswire UK releases that got at least one share on either Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest (I don’t know how many press releases in total were published to the web by PR Newswire UK in 2017. However, taking Jan 11th 2018 as a typical day, there appear to be a total of 131 releases released on that date. Assuming there are 260 working days in a year would bring the annual estimate to around 34000 releases in 2017. Allowing that a smaller number of releases would go out over a weekend, that might bump the overall total to around 35000. That would suggest that less 10pc of all PR Newswire UK releases published get any social media shares at all).

However, the vast majority of shared releases received 10 shares or less – around 2660 or 85pc of the total shared.

Only 104 press releases got more than 100 shares. That’s 3pc of the total of releases that were shared at all (or just under 0.3pc of all releases published in total).

And the most shared press release of all was a bit of an outlier. It received a total of 23,400 shares – virtually all of them via Facebook (and quite why a press release about blockchain security would garner such interest on Facebook is curious). This was nearly 14 times the share total for the second highest shared release which was this one – which received 1700 shares.

Looking at the top 20 most shared UK press releases, there doesn't seem to be any obvious indicators as to why they got social sharing traction and the vast majority didn’t. Certain releases did better on certain platforms (eg the Oracle release probably got traction on LinkedIn because of the obvious recruitment angle).

One other observation from the Buzzsumo data. Hardly any press releases receive in bound links (ie links from other websites). If you had lingering illusions that a press release might get to the top of Google for any meaningful keyword searches, this should disabuse you of the notion. SEMRush seems to suggest that prnewswire.co.uk gets around 5900 visits a month from organic search - and a relatively small number of pages are responsible for that traffic.

In short, the vast majority of PR Newswire press releases do not get shared on social media. I’m willing to bet that there will be a similar picture irrespective of the press distribution service concerned.

If nothing else, it does suggest that attempting to get social media sharing (or Google search visibility) for a press release should not be your prime motivator for creating one. And if you are going write one, Stephen Waddington has provided some timely advice here.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.