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

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

#12

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?

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.

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

#13
post #7
post #4

Earlier 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 ?

Sharing something doesn't mean people have read it in full. :) I know I sometimes start reading an article, "get where it's going" and pass it on.

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".

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