3 things we learned about social media traffic in 2022

In the past few years the Search and Social landscape for news publishers has been decidedly mixed. 

At the same time, we’ve seen unprecedented upheaval within social media companies, as Facebook and Instagram scramble to adapt to the popularity of insurgents like TikTok, and Twitter has been through months of prolonged turbulence since its acquisition by Elon Musk at the end of 2022.

To lend our expertise on the social media side of things, we looked at engagement stats for more than 4,000 publishers from countries around the world to understand:

  • What happened to social media traffic in 2022?
  • How has engagement with organic posts changed in the last few years?
  • How engaging are video posts compared to link posts?
  • What social engagement trends can we take away from 2022 in particular?

Here’s what we found.

The share of pageviews from social media rebounded in 2022

For other platforms, the data revealed the opposite: the share of traffic generated from Instagram, for instance, declined in 2022, from 0.24% in 2021 to 0.19%. These findings are notable given that Instagram has been a platform on which publishers see significant room for expansion, although its posting structure makes it less effective at driving referral traffic compared to other social platforms. 

The same trend is true of Twitter, which has seen a steady decline in pageviews since a high point during the COVID pandemic. In 2020, the platform produced an average of 1.22% of all referral traffic for publishers. By 2021, this number had dropped to 1.04%, while 2022 saw this number decline even further to just 0.89% — a 27% decrease in the past two years.

Given that Facebook is the dominant source of referral traffic from social media for news publishers, we’ll focus exclusively on the platform in the insights that follow. 

CTR on Facebook has increased in 2023 while video view rates outstrip clicks  

Since 2021, the average click-through rate of organic content on Facebook has risen from 2.5% to 3%. This will be music to the ears of news publishers for whom clicks from social media are still a fundamental means of traffic generation. 

Moreover, the growing interest in platforms such as TikTok and Instagram has positioned publishers in good stead when it comes to producing video content. In our Publishing Trends Report 2022, we noted that 63% of respondents said creating video content would be more important in 2022 — 20 percentage points more than activities like newsletters and exploring new social media platforms.

Facebook engagement increased in 2022 compared to the year before

While Facebook traffic and engagement picked up in 2022 as compared to the year before, if we look in more detail, we see that engagement metrics on the platform declined throughout the second half of 2022 before rallying around December. For more perspective on this decline, we looked at three engagement metrics: clicks, likes and comments, and impressions.

The decline in impressions after July is notable as impressions tend to drive other metrics. For example, the level of exposure a shared post receives makes it more or less likely that someone will choose to engage with it. That said, the relationship between impressions and engagement metrics is less definitive as the form of engagement becomes more complex. This can be seen in the following graphs.

When we compare impressions against Facebook click data, we see that as impressions trended downward in the second half of 2022, so, too, did engagement in the form of clicks. This correlation may reflect the fact that clicks are the simplest form of engagement for an audience to carry out. When we look at the relationship between impressions and a more complex form of interaction like comments, however, the correlation is less clear.

Comparing clicks, comments and likes to impressions, we see a fairly uniform decline in the latter part of the year across all engagement metrics, with the decline in comments appearing particularly steep. It remains to be seen whether December’s uptick in impressions and engagement remains, or whether it is an anomaly.

Though we cannot make a definitive conclusion, Facebook’s decision to prioritize video content such as Reels may be at least partially responsible for the downward trend in impressions and engagement across all post formats that we saw in 2022. But with publishers continuing to invest in short video, we may begin to see increased engagement on Facebook in the long term. 

Our takeaways

  1. Publishers saw a higher proportion of pageviews from social media in 2022, but this was mainly due to increased traffic from Facebook compensating for declining traffic from other social platforms.
  2. Video posts outperform link posts on Facebook if we compare CTR to video view rate. We would expect this trend to continue and even perhaps increase with the company’s focus on Reels.
  3. Impressions and engagement declined throughout the second half of 2022, before picking up in December. This was true of all metrics measured, demonstrating their interconnected nature.