The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#2Thank you for posting this. Our CTO Sean Falconer did a great job with this!
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#3Thank you for posting this. Our CTO Sean Falconer did a great job with this!
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
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#4Thank you for posting this. Our CTO Sean Falconer did a great job with this!
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
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.
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#5Great 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
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#6Good read. Did any of the rankings search Twitter for dissemination of articles? Or was that firehouse of information simply too large to track?
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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 impa…
Hey Sean. This is pretty interesting. My only concern would be that longer articles could be more difficult to "digest" for the reader and therefore less engaging. I would expect a viral professional article to need to be long and a viral casual article to need to be shorter. Is that something you have ever researched ?
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#8Good read. Did any of the rankings search Twitter for dissemination of articles? Or was that firehouse of information simply too large to track?
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.
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#9Great 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 "…
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.
Re: The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 impa…
Hey Sean. This is pretty interesting. My only concern would be that longer articles could be more difficult to "digest" for the reader and therefore less engaging. I would expect a viral professional article to need to be long and a viral casual article to need to be shorter. Is that something you have ever researched ?
I have not researched that specifically, but the team at BuzzSumo analyzed 120 million articles and found a similar result. They found the optimal length for an article on Facebook to be 2000-2500 words and on LinkedIn to be 3500-4000.
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.