Welcome to the world's first Social Media Index. The SMI shows you how much traffic publishers receive from social media every single day.
The Social Media Index (SMI) shows you the percentage of traffic that publishers receive from social media every single day.
The importance of social media in generating web traffic is a hot topic. Yet there is no central repository that gives the public an insight into what that traffic actually corresponds to. Although there are existing analyses that try to convey this information, the granularity and scope of the Social Media Index is unmatched.
Data from reputable research organisations like Pew is valuable, but focuses mainly on the United States and is only updated every few months due to the cost and logistical challenges of high-quality opinion polls. Research centres like the Reuters Institute provide cross-country data on how people access content online, but this is only available on a yearly basis. And benchmarking solutions like SimilarWeb rely on small samples of data sets collected from internet users, which don't show accurate data.
Our data, however, is available on a daily basis, and it does not rely on self-reporting, which is known to create difficulties in a variety of fields within the social sciences. The SMI aggregates real-time analytics data collected from Echobox's collaboration with a few thousand publishers from an unrivalled number of countries and publications.
The Social Media Index is the first of its kind, making it possible for anyone to easily identify trends, spot spikes and patterns in social-media generated traffic, and in many cases even identify their cause.
The chart shows the percentage of pageviews from users who visit publishers' websites from social networks.
The colours show you which social network was most important, and how the importance of each social network changed over time. Facebook has long been the dominant source of traffic, indicated by the grey area at the bottom. The red area indicates the amount of traffic added by X/Twitter. You can also export the data as a CSV-file to run your own analysis and produce your own visualisations.
To compile the SMI, we aggregate traffic sources of over a thousand different publishers from across the world - from London to LA and from Singapore to Buenos Aires - covering news, economics, business, tech, culture, science, entertainment and a wide variety of specialist subjects.
Every morning, we count the total number of visitors and pageviews over the previous day, as well as the number of visitors who came from social media. The SMI is the ratio of pageviews from social media-derived visitors over total pageviews.
Giving back to the community is important to us, so anyone is permitted to use the SMI for personal, commercial or academic purposes. All we ask for is that you mention Echobox with a link back to either the SMI or our main website and/or add our logo (dark, bright, transparent dark or transparent bright).
We hope you will find this data as useful and fascinating as we do, and we hope that it will inspire passionate debate, thoughtful discussion and data-driven analysis for our time.
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