How Much of an Article do you Read Before you Share? Question of the Week

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We’re all busy. I’m busy, you’re busy. There’s always something interesting to read, watch or play. When it comes to life online, these statements couldn’t be more true.

Recently, I read a Slate article that explained that only a very small number of readers actually finish an article before they share it to social media. The author got together with a data scientist and analyst from Chartbeat, a real time web analytics site. After running some numbers they realized that readers just cannot stay focused online. When people get into an article, they rarely make it to the bottom of the page. Interestingly, the data suggested that people are actually sharing a story on their social media accounts that they haven’t read through.

So are we to just assume that if someone is recommending a story online they probably haven’t read it? To find out if this was true, we decided to ask our followers: How much of an article do you read before you hit the share button?

Your answers were all across the board: many of you claimed to read an entire article every time, some honestly explained that its only the first couple of paragraphs. Let’s take a look at the answers, and see how far many of you get through an article.

These followers answered honestly and stated that they usually don’t read an entire article before sharing it with their friends and followers. For many people, just reading the first paragraph and headline are enough for them to form an opinion and want to get others involved.

We recently wrote about the reasons why people share content over social media. We found that 61% of people share information simply because they find it interesting. Other than that, people loved to share content that they felt was important or funny. Sometimes, when it comes to sharing these types of content, you don’t have to read the article start to finish to find it interesting or funny.

Many of our readers saw the risk in sharing something that hasn’t been read through entirely.  These people are aware that the type of content they share reflects on who they are. Sharing without reading thoroughly means risking your own reputation. What if an article has a really great headline, but has content that you disagree with completely? What if you read through half of the article, but the ending point is something we don’t want reflecting on ourselves? It happens, but if you don’t want it happening, our advice is to read the whole thing.

Usually by this point, most of you have already left. I wonder how many people have stuck it out to the very end. This is usually the point where I come up with a clever way to close out the article, something witty and funny. This time, however, I’ll say this: If you are still here, you are awesome.
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