The UK government ran one of the most thorough studies on this. When GOV.UK added social sharing buttons, they tracked usage for 10 weeks across 6.8 million pageviews. The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. The most telling part: the feature sat in their backlog for ages because zero end users had ever requested it. In their user testing, people just copied and pasted links.

Moovweb found the same thing when they analyzed 61 million mobile sessions. Only 0.2% of mobile users interacted with social sharing at all. Visitors were twelve times more likely to click an advertisement.

Luke Wroblewski, the interaction designer and author, crowdsourced data from his readers and landed on an average of 0.25% across 18 million pageviews. Different organizations, different audiences, same number.

In 2012, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic noticed a huge chunk of the magazine’s web traffic showing up as “direct” in Google Analytics. Those visitors weren’t typing URLs or using bookmarks. They were clicking links that someone had pasted into a text thread, an email chain, a Slack channel.