I have social sharing buttons on this website. Twitter, LinkedIn, copy link, the whole row. They look great. Very professional. I'm fairly certain nobody has ever clicked one.
Let me rephrase. Statistically, someone probably has. But the number is so embarrassingly small it reads like a rounding error. Like putting a tip jar at the end of a free buffet.
The Numbers Are Not On My Side
I'm not the only one who's looked at this, and the answer keeps coming back the same. Derek Hanson collected the three numbers everyone cites in one place, which saved me an afternoon, so the trail below is his.
The UK government ran the most thorough of the three. They added share buttons to GOV.UK and published the first ten weeks of data: 6,849,781 pageviews, 14,078 clicks, 0.21%. One in every 476 visitors. Their own framing is the part that stings. "It wasn't a feature that had been particularly requested by end users." Nobody showed up and said "you know what this government website needs? A tweet button." They built it because everyone else had one.
Moovweb looked at 61 million mobile sessions and found 0.2% of users touched a share button at all. Adweek's writeup of the study puts it as mobile users being 11.5 times more likely to click an ad. An ad. The thing we all pretend we don't see.
The third number is the softest. Luke Wroblewski crowdsourced click rates from his readers and landed on 0.25% across 18 million pageviews. Reader-reported, not audited, and the page it was published on is offline now, so weigh it accordingly. Three sources, three audiences, same depressing number.
I keep wondering if these studies being from the 2010s matters. Like, maybe things changed? They did not. If anything, it got worse. Mobile browsers ship with a native share sheet that's better than anything a website can build. Desktop users have been using Ctrl+C since before social media existed.
What People Actually Do
The boring answer, which keeps winning. People copy the URL. They paste it into a text message, an email, a Slack channel, a Discord DM. Then the person on the other end clicks it. In Google Analytics, this shows up as "direct traffic." Looks like someone typed the URL by hand. What actually happened is someone pasted a link into a group chat.
There's a name for this. "Dark social," coined by Alexis Madrigal in a 2012 piece for The Atlantic. Which sounds ominous until you realize it just means "links shared through private channels that analytics can't track." It's how most links actually travel the internet. None of our metrics pick it up.
I checked my own analytics while writing this. "Direct" is my top referrer, and it's not even close. People are sharing my posts. They're just doing it the old-fashioned way. Copy, paste, send.
So Why Do We Keep Building Them?
This is the part where I have to look in the mirror. I added share buttons to my site because every other blog has them. It's what you do. It signals that you're a Real Publisher who cares about Distribution. Nobody uses them, but the buttons are there so I can pretend I tried.
The charitable take is that share buttons are harmless. They cost almost nothing to render, they don't take up much space. And hey. Maybe one person in five hundred clicks one. But every share button on a page is a tiny lie we tell ourselves. It lets us believe we did something to help our content spread, when the actual work is writing something worth copying and pasting.