5 minute read

Finding meaning in the smaller number: why little to no engagement with social posts is ‘normal’

Did you know that around one in ten items uploaded to CoverageBook last year was from a social media channel rather than a news URL?  This indicates the evolving activities of PR teams, who are using ever more diverse ways to showcase achievements on social media as well as traditional news media to highlight outputs (reach) and outcomes (engagement) from communications activities. 

Where information is made available by social platforms, CoverageBook can collect audience data and social engagements for you, typically on a per-post basis. This information, in aggregate, informed the benchmarking data shared below. 

If you want to know more about what platforms you can add to Coveragebook, there is a summary of the data collected per platform on this page.

Our research led us to explore these questions: 

  • Which types of social media content are our customers uploading?
  • Do we see the trend increasing?
  • What do CoverageBook’s social media data points around views and engagements tell us on a macro scale and by channel?
  • How can you benchmark your views and engagements on social channels against our benchmarks?

Key takeaways:

  • PR teams are submitting more content from Instagram than X or Facebook, suggesting an evolution in the way they are communicating and engaging with audiences.
  • We observed no notable downturn in content from X submitted by PR teams despite media industry backlash against the channel in the latter part of 2024 (in connection with US political situation).
  • TikTok and Instagram content is most likely to ‘go viral’ and receive more than 100k views.  
  • Just under 30% of social content submitted received no engagement, a further 36% received 50 or fewer engagements.
  • Only 28% of social content submitted to CoverageBook received engagement levels above 100 (likes, comments, shares, saves combined) – if you received engagement in the thousands, you are among the top 10% across our benchmark.

Firstly, let’s reflect on the social channels that you are submitting coverage from

Proportion of social content uploaded to CoverageBook during 2024 by channel:

Instagram31%
X28%
Facebook17%
YouTube16%
TikTok4%
Twitch2%
Spotify1%

Almost a third of social URLs uploaded to CoverageBook in 2024 were from Instagram (31%), 28% was from X, 17% from Facebook and 16% from YouTube. Did you know that our system can also gather data from platforms including TikTok, Twitch and Spotify?  These other channels made up 7% of the social content submitted last year.  

There continues to be a steady stream of X content uploaded for inclusion, with this being the second most prolific source of social content submitted to CoverageBook during 2024. There was no downturn in URLs submitted from X in the latter part of 2024, indeed the monthly volume rose towards the end of 2024, at a time when some in the media and comms sector were turning their backs on this channel for political or ideological reasons. 

There has been steady growth in Spotify links added to CoverageBook last year, with around twice the number of URLs uploaded at the end of the year than at the start. Content submissions from TikTok have been steadily increasing with an average of 2.4k TikTok URLs submitted per month.

There is no trend to the volume of YouTube URLs submitted to CoverageBook across the year, with notable spikes at key moments (June and October) – which may correspond to half year and quarterly reporting season.

Now let’s look at what engagement rates look like across different platforms

Broadly, here are the macro trends we see per channel* in terms of engagement rates (total post level engagements divided by the total post level views per channel).

TikTok: 8.7%

Instagram: 5.4%

YouTube: 2.6%

Twitter: 1.4%

Twitch: 0.1%

*Facebook is excluded from this list due to limited views dataset, Spotify currently supports data for playlists only, not episodes, so we have also excluded its aggregate engagement rate from the list above.

Benchmarking data – how did your campaign fare against our 2024 data and benchmarks?

Facebook

70% of Facebook content received no engagement.

Facebook engagement rangeDescriptionShare of Facebook content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None70%
1-50 Getting seen23%
51-100 Building awareness2%
101-1,000 Generating interest4%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving engagement1%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum0.03%
>100,000Viral0.01%

Views data not included for Facebook due to limited dataset.

Instagram

Views and engagement increasing steadily throughout the year.

If your Instagram post receives between 101 and 25k views, you are in the majority against our benchmark data.

The majority of content uploaded to Instagram received fewer than 100 engagements.

8% of CoverageBook’s customers Instagram content ‘went viral’ in terms of visibility.

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of Instagram content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None8%
1-50 Getting seen3.5%
51-100 Building awareness1.7%
101-1,000 Generating interest15.3%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility49.6%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum14%
>100,000Viral8%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of Instagram content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None15%
1-50 Getting seen31%
51-100 Building awareness9%
101-1,000 Generating interest28%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility15%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum1.4%
>100,000Viral0.6%

X (formerly Twitter)

Views flatlining over time, significant rise in engagement towards end of 2024.

66% of X coverage on CoverageBook received fewer than 1,000 views. 

Almost one in three of the posts uploaded from X received no engagement – it is normal to receive low levels of engagement (fewer than 50).

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of X content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None6%
1-50 Getting seen22%
51-100 Building awareness9%
101-1,000 Generating interest29%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility26%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum4.6%
>100,000Viral3.2%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of X content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None31%
1-50 Getting seen54%
51-100 Building awareness4%
101-1,000 Generating interest8%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility3.5%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum0.3%
>100,000Viral0.03%

TikTok

Virality leads to some spikiness in views over time, notable peaks in January and March, with associated peaks in engagement also. Notably high engagement in August without specific volume or views peak in this month.

TikTok is more likely than Instagram to generate viral visibility (>100k views) and best overall for driving higher levels of engagement.

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of TikTok content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None3.5%
1-50 Getting seen3%
51-100 Building awareness1.5%
101-1,000 Generating interest26%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility43%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum11%
>100,000Viral11%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of TikTok content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None4%
1-50 Getting seen29%
51-100 Building awareness12%
101-1,000 Generating interest30%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility21%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum3%
>100,000Viral2%

YouTube

Majority of YouTube links shared (52%) received fewer than 1,000 views. Nearly one in three YouTube videos received 100 views or fewer. 

Majority of YouTube coverage submitted received fewer than 50 engagements or none at all.  

‘Viral’ engagement on YouTube is more likely to mean comment volumes in three figures rather than in the thousands or millions.

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of YouTube content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None4%
1-50 Getting seen19%
51-100 Building awareness6%
101-1,000 Generating interest22%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility35%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum10%
>100,000Viral4%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of YouTube content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None13%
1-50 Getting seen41%
51-100 Building awareness7%
101-1,000 Generating interest27%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility11%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum0.5%
>100,000Viral0.1%

Twitch

Twitch is not yet driving significant visibility nor engagement.

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of Twitch content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None60%
1-50 Getting seen11.5%
51-100 Building awareness4%
101-1,000 Generating interest12%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility11%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum2%
>100,000Viral0.6%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of Twitch content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None99%
1-50 Getting seen0.6%
51-100 Building awareness0.1%
101-1,000 Generating interest0.3%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility0.1%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum
>100,000Viral

Spotify

CoverageBook now supports metrics for Spotify playlists.  You can find more information on how to do this and the data we gather here.  

A significant number of Spotify URLs uploaded to CoverageBook during 2024 were for episodes [where we cannot provide the audience size] rather than playlists, which explains the ‘extremes’ in the visibility ranges shown below.

Where playlist follower numbers could be retrieved, the audience sizes ranged from ~180k to ~369k.

A significant share of Spotify content uploaded to CoverageBook feature within the ‘no engagement’ zone because they were episodes rather than playlists, and our data collection only supports playlists.

Reach (views) rangeDescriptionShare of Spotify content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility
None82%
1-50 Getting seen1%
51-100 Building awareness0.3%
101-1,000 Generating interest1.2%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility2.2%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum0.2%
>100,000Viral13.3%
Engagement rangeDescriptionShare of Spotify content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement
None48%
1-50 Getting seen6%
51-100 Building awareness2%
101-1,000 Generating interest11%
1,001 to 25,000 Driving visibility27%
25,001 to 100,000Gaining momentum5%
>100,000Viral1.4%

Please note that we have not included aggregated views data from Facebook due to the restrictions on data availability.  We also excluded occasions when customers uploaded home page URLs for the social channels, rather than post specific URLs and when we observed anomalous datapoints (e.g. where engagements were showing but no associated views number was retrieved) so as not to skew the information below.  Do bear this in mind when adding URLs to CoverageBook – we need a specific article or post level URL to gather the credible audience data for you.

Written by —
Steph Bridgeman

Steph Bridgeman

Steph is the founder of Experienced Media Analysts, an award-winning media insight Consultancy and board member of the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication - AMEC.