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:
| 31% | |
| X | 28% |
| 17% | |
| YouTube | 16% |
| TikTok | 4% |
| Twitch | 2% |
| Spotify | 1% |
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?
70% of Facebook content received no engagement.
| Facebook engagement range | Description | Share of Facebook content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 70% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 23% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 2% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 4% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving engagement | 1% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 0.03% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 0.01% |
Views data not included for Facebook due to limited dataset.
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) range | Description | Share of Instagram content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 8% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 3.5% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 1.7% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 15.3% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 49.6% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 14% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 8% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of Instagram content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 15% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 31% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 9% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 28% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 15% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 1.4% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 0.6% |
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) range | Description | Share of X content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 6% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 22% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 9% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 29% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 26% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 4.6% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 3.2% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of X content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 31% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 54% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 4% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 8% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 3.5% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 0.3% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 0.03% |
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) range | Description | Share of TikTok content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 3.5% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 3% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 1.5% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 26% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 43% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 11% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 11% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of TikTok content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 4% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 29% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 12% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 30% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 21% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 3% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 2% |
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) range | Description | Share of YouTube content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 4% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 19% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 6% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 22% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 35% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 10% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 4% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of YouTube content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 13% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 41% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 7% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 27% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 11% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 0.5% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 0.1% |
Twitch
Twitch is not yet driving significant visibility nor engagement.
| Reach (views) range | Description | Share of Twitch content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 60% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 11.5% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 4% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 12% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 11% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 2% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 0.6% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of Twitch content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 99% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 0.6% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 0.1% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 0.3% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 0.1% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | – |
| >100,000 | Viral | – |
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) range | Description | Share of Spotify content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of visibility |
| 0 | None | 82% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 1% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 0.3% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 1.2% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 2.2% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 0.2% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 13.3% |
| Engagement range | Description | Share of Spotify content uploaded to CoverageBook which returned this level of engagement |
| 0 | None | 48% |
| 1-50 | Getting seen | 6% |
| 51-100 | Building awareness | 2% |
| 101-1,000 | Generating interest | 11% |
| 1,001 to 25,000 | Driving visibility | 27% |
| 25,001 to 100,000 | Gaining momentum | 5% |
| >100,000 | Viral | 1.4% |
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.
