The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts

http://blog.proven.com/virality-and-content-sharing

by mcaserta • 10 years ago

31 14 10 years ago

blog.proven.com

Pablo1856• 10 years ago

Thank you for posting this. Our CTO Sean Falconer did a great job with this!

mcaserta2• 10 years ago

Hey Pablo, congrats for the article, really well written and extremely interesting. I was wondering if you had any interesting input regarding what is better for a blog between writing a short article every day or a longer in-depth article once a week. Thanks, Michele

seanf805• 10 years ago

Hi Michele,

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.

joemellin• 10 years ago

Great content!

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

seanf805• 10 years ago

Thanks for the questions.

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.

AGr33nb3rg• 10 years ago

Good read. Did any of the rankings search Twitter for dissemination of articles? Or was that firehouse of information simply too large to track?

seanf805• 10 years ago

Great 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.

jresnicow• 10 years ago

Very cool post! Thanks for sharing? How applicable do you think the learnings are for businesses outside of HR/recruiting? Could the same be applied to content marketing for other types SaaS?

seanf805• 10 years ago

I think many of the findings are applicable to any business.

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.

ramin138• 10 years ago

Great Post! Thanks for publishing!

emanuelpleitez• 10 years ago

Great insights!

The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts

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