The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
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Really interesting on the emotion/length/publish date.
For some of the graphs I would love to get some clarification.
EX: for " Number of shares per article lenght" is that average number of shares per article of that length?
I think that is what it is as the average post seems to get around 70-80 shares.
The main question I have is on Social Shares by Publication Day, as it is in the 400-600 is that "total shares per publication day?" or "average number of shares per post on each day?" I ask because if it is the former then it may just be that most people post on Tuesday so there are more shares on Tuesday.
Regardless awesome content would love to know more about the process behind it looking at all the blog posts.
Ex did you build your own scraper or use one of the new ones from PH like https://www.producthunt.com/tech/crawly
Both the number of shares per article length graph and the shares per day of the week are averages, not the absolute values. I'll be sure to clarify that in the post.
The crawlers were all custom written.
There's some different schools of thought on this.
A lot of content marketers and SEO experts recommend lots of articles targeting long tail keywords. However, the newer thought process is to write longer more in-depth articles and spend equal time promoting those articles.
As you can see from the article we published, we found longer articles lead to more shares. Brian Dean found that content length impacts Google rankings (http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors) and KissMetrics got a similar result as us in terms of shares being correlated with longer articles (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/share-on-social-media/).
The sweet spot for the length depends on sharing source and the domain you are writing about.
Thanks for your question.
So what you suggest could be true, the length of an article that does well on Facebook is shorter than LinkedIn and I'd argue that an article on Facebook is likely for a more casual reader than on LinkedIn.
However, even 2000 words is a fairly long article. They also found that articles under 500 words perform the worst.
More often than not, sharing long article is a form of self-praise (for me). I feel very pleased with myself sharing a piece from Aeon on Facebook, amidst cats and babies and other stuff: "Look at me, I'm deep and I'm making Facebook a smarter place".
So, it makes total sense that long read gets more shares per view, but it doesn't necessarily mean deeper "engagement".
I think article length always impacts virality but the sweet spot might change based on the domain. You'd have to experiment, but we see consistently across domains that articles less than 500 words perform poorly.
For SaaS, I think the best sharing channels are likely going to be LinkedIn and Twitter. Consumer apps is probably Facebook and Twitter.
The other findings like positive language, posting on Tuesday's and people loving lists are themes that other people have found in other domains.
Thanks for the question.
I'd love to have Twitter data, but last year Twitter removed share counts from their Tweet and follow buttons, so it's hard to get reliable information about how many shares are happening for a given piece of content on Twitter.
However, I do think that if we had access to that information, Twitter would have a similar share profile as LinkedIn, especially in the HR space. Based on my experience, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most widely used channels for people writing and working in that space.