What is share rate?

How often people who saw a post sent it on: shares divided by views.

Share rate is shares divided by views, written as a percentage or as shares per 1,000 views. It tells you how often a viewer decided a post was worth sending to someone else.

It’s a different signal from views. Views tell you a post was served and watched. Shares tell you someone wanted a friend to see it. In a real Arcus content report for a hard seltzer brand, the most shared Instagram post took 409 shares on 8,000 views, 51 per thousand, and no other post was above 12. It wasn’t the most viewed post, and it sat outside every content type the team had planned.

Why it matters

A share means someone put their own name behind your post. It’s often the clearest sign a post has a life beyond the people who saw it.

An example

Example (made-up numbers): post A gets 20,000 views and 40 shares, a share rate of 0.2%. Post B gets 5,000 views and 50 shares, a share rate of 1%. B reached fewer people, and each viewer was five times as likely to send it on.

Where it misleads

Reading share rate on tiny counts. In the same hard seltzer report, 24 of 29 Facebook posts had zero or one share, so share rate on Facebook was ranking posts on single shares. At those numbers it’s noise.

How Arcus handles it

Our answers about content show views and shares side by side for each platform, never added across platforms, and flag where share counts are too small to read. We also note when a share count comes from a third-party tool and can’t be checked against the platform.

More in our guide: How to tell which of your posts work