Linkedin and Buzzsumo content report will make you successful in 5 ways
Back in 2008, a work colleague sent me the invitation to join Linkedin. I accepted it, but it took me quite a while to spot its precious value as a clean, insightful, business related network. I am fascinated how easily I could get into contact with the world’s top business leaders and how much great content I could access.
This is how I discovered a report called: The DNA Behind the World’s Most Successful Content.
Linkedin and Buzzsumo carried the most in-depth analysis of content marketing effectiveness on social media. They used data from +400,000 posts on all major social media networks over the past 12 months (40,000 most shared posts from 10 different industries). First result: there is no single formula for content marketing success, it highly depends on each industry.
There are two ways that content shared on social media can contribute to your business and marketing objectives:
1. immediate impact, interest and excitement that drives short term reach (shares)
While it may seem a vanity metric, sharing, along with links and paid promotion is one of the main ways that content is amplified. At Linkedin, by example, approximately 4,000 shares of content by employees could add over 10 million in reach.
2. enduring authority and influence in the long run (backlinks)
Backlinks, links to a post from other web pages are a key to content authority and SEO. They make a direct contribution to relevant brand awareness and reach through ranking highly for relevant search terms.
But how can you ensure great content if you are working in the marekting, techonology or travel industry? Which are the elements to take care of? There are 5 ways that you need to follow:
1. Topic: Posts with Tips in the title, Reasearch-focused posts and “How to posts” get 4-5 times more shares than the average for marketing posts. Uber and Virtual Reality mentions work for Techonology posts and Elon Musk for Financial Services
While the average share is below 400 from all 40,000 analysed marketing posts, in case of the top performing like the three mentioned above (tips in the title, research, how to) the number of shares can go up to 1,759. Guides, top ten lists and infographics are following.
The situation is much different if we speak about Technology, where guides are the top type of post, but with a relatively similar number of shares versus the industry average. However, if the posts included Uber, Virtual reality anf Microsoft reference, the shares jumped up to 7 times the average.
While in the marketing posts it is about the tactics rather than individuals, in the financial services posts a link to a strong personlity such as Elon Musk will outperform the average.
In Travel, which is the least represented on Linkedin, destinations of the moment have a big presence among top-performing posts (London and India), as well as intriguing stories.
Examples of content topic hotspots:
- 50 Best Social Media Tools from 50 Most Influential Marketers Online (marketing)
- IBM’s First Female CEO on Why Bob Dylan is Talking to a Computer (financial services)
- Destination of the Month: Armenia - The Land of Resilience Welcomes You (Travel)
2. Optimum length for content: posts over 2,000 words generate more shares than those with less than 1,000 words in both Marketing and Techonology (up to 7 times more in marketing)
A few years ago there was a well passed wisdom that online copy should not exceed 650 words for all the reasons we all know. Now it is proven that longer versions (3 times longer) are bringing more shares, no matter the sector.
A marketing post with over 2,000 words is 1,5 times more shared than the average for the industry.
Forget about the myth with the golden fish attention span which is bigger than ours (there is no scientific proof apparently). Of the 80,000 most shared posts in Marketing and Technology sectors, 80% have fewer than 1,000 words. However, they are not the most influential and authoritative posts in the category. People demand more than a snackable content (what a nice word, thanks Linkedin for it).
3. Headline: The three-word phrases that generated the most shares on Linkedin over the past 10 months are “is the new”, “the year of”, “in the workplace”, “the future of”, “why you should”, “how to”, “the power of”, “5 ways”, “can learn from”
The highest number of available articles are with the headline “how to” (almost 4,000).
There are different successful words if it is a B2B or B2C content. Still, Linkedin report encourages mixing them as a tool to stand out in the crowd of “how to’s”.
Out of 100 million headlines across all social networks, the three-word phrases most effective at driving sharing for B2C content are: “will make you”, “this is why”, “can we guess”, “only x in”, “the reason is”, “are freaking out”, etc
4. Type: Practical guides and how-to posts have a big role in the marketing sector, but strong opinion pieces are also likely to drive shares higher
Interestingly, when it comes to backlinks, different types of content such as news stories and future-facing pieces take on a more proeminent role.
eg: Five Content Marketing Trends to Watch in 2017
In Technology, news and trend-related posts are most likely to appear among the most shared posts and with the biggest number of backlinks.
eg: AdultFriendFinder network hack exposes 412 million accounts
For Higher Education, current news agenda or a relevant piece of new research with strong opinions is the driver of shares. Backlinks are driven in this case by research and academic analysis
eg: Artificial intelligence used to identify skin cancer
5. Format: video, image-led posts and quizzes highly used by two strong internet publishers such as Buzzfeed and Popsugar can drive the interest for more format types
The content that generates links tends to follow more conventional formats in terms of news and opinion posts, but there are options such as video, lists posts and infographics that are worth to explore and would have less competition in the big social media sea of content .
P.S. If you want to explore in depth the report, please go to this link:
https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/cx/2017/pdfs/the_dna_behind_the_worlds_most_succesful_content_v1.pdf
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