We measure social media engagement in two ways:
Post Engagement is specific to a post made by the publisher (e.g. The Guardian, Le Monde, BBC, etc.) on a social media platform.
Web Share Engagement is specific to a URL of the published article.
What are Web Shares?
When an article is published on a website, it is accessible via a URL.
When that URL is shared by individual users to a social platform like Facebook, it counts as one Web Share. If that user's friends comment, share, or like that post all of that engagement will also count as Web Shares.
For example:
Bob looks at the BBC Website and decides to share a story to Facebook.
He copies the URL of the article into a Facebook post, or he shares that article through the Facebook sharing button on BBC's Website.
This counts as one Web Share Engagement.
Now Bob's friends see his post on Facebook, they comment on it and several of them share that post themselves.
All the engagement above also counts as Web Share Engagement.
Let's compare this with On Post Engagement:
BBC News posts an article on their own Facebook page.
Facebook users see this post on Facebook and like, comment or share it.
All that engagement is Post Engagement, because it occurred on a Post made by a public page.
Web Share Engagement accounts for the majority of total engagement on Facebook. You should have a handle on both types to best understand what is popular on Facebook.
For Twitter, Web Share Engagement is unavailable, as Twitter disabled the ability to track it some years ago.
In EzyInsights, Web Share Engagement is available for Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Please do contact us and feel free to ask more if it is still confusing :)