This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links.
What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.
On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that people love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets far more shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to work much harder to acquire links. Our research uncovered:
- The sweet spot content that achieves both shares and links
- The content that achieves higher than average referring domain links
- The impact of content formats and content length on shares and links
Our summary findings are as follows:
- The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In a randomly selected sample of 100,000 posts over 50% had 2 or less Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments) and over 75% had zero external links. This suggests there is a lot of very poor content out there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content.
- When we looked at a bigger sample of 750,000 well shared posts we found over 50% of these posts still had zero external links. Thus suggests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cases large numbers of shares, they find it far harder to acquire links.
- Shares and links are not normally distributed around an average. There are high performing outlier posts that get a lot of shares and links but most content is grouped at the low end, with close to zero shares and links. For example, over 75% of articles from our random sample of 100,000 posts had zero external links and just 1 or less referring domain link.
- Across our total sample of 1m posts there was NO overall correlation of shares and links, implying people share and link for different reasons. The correlation of total shares and referring domain links across 750,000 articles was just 0.021.
- There are, however, specific content types that do have a strong positive correlation of shares and links. This includes research backed content and opinion forming journalism. We found these content formats achieve both higher shares and significantly more links.
- 85% of content published (excluding videos and quizzes) is less than 1,000 words long. However, long form content of over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content. Either people ignore the data or it is simply too hard for them to write quality long form content.
- Content formats matter. Formats such as entertainment videos and quizzes are far more likely to be shared than linked to. Some quizzes and videos get hundreds of thousands of shares but no links.
- List posts and videos achieve much higher shares on average than other content formats. However, in terms of achieving links, list posts and why posts achieve a higher number of referring domain links than other content formats on average. While we may love to hate them, list posts remain a powerful content format.
We have outlined the findings in more detail below. You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:
Download the full 30-page research report
The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links
We pulled an initial sample of 757,000 posts from the BuzzSumo database. 100,000 of these posts were pulled at random and acted as a control group. As we wanted to investigate certain content formats, the other 657,000 were well shared videos, ‘how to’ posts, list posts, quizzes, infographics, why posts and videos. The overall sample therefore had a specific bias to well shared posts and specific content formats. However, despite this bias towards well shared articles, 50% of our 757,000 articles still had 11 or less Twitter shares and 50% of the posts had zero external links.
By comparison 50% of the 100,000 randomly selected posts had 2 or less Twitter shares, 2 or less Facebook interactions, 1 or less Google+ shares and zero LinkedIn shares. 75% of the posts had zero external links and 1 or less referring domain links.
75% of randomly selected articles had zero external links
Shares and links are not normally distributed
Shares and links are not distributed normally around an average. Some posts go viral and get a very high numbers of shares and links. This distorts the average, the vast majority of posts receive very few shares or links and sit at the bottom of a very skewed distribution curve as shown below.
This chart is cut off on the right at 1,000 shares, in fact the long thin tail would extend a very long way as a number of articles received over 1m shares and one received 5.7m shares.
This long tail distribution is the same for shares and links across all the domains we analyzed. The skewed nature of the distribution means that averages can be misleading due to the long tail of highly shared or linked content. In the example below we show the distribution of shares for a domain. In this example the average is the blue line but 50% of all posts lie to the left of the red line, the median.
There is NO correlation of shares and links
We used the Pearson correlation co-efficient, a measure of the linear correlation between two variables. The results can range from between 1 (a total positive correlation) to 0 (where there is no correlation) to −1 (a total negative correlation).
The overall correlations for our sample were:
Total shares and Referring Domain Links 0.021
Total shares and Sub-domain Links 0.020
Total shares and External Links 0.011
The results suggest that people share and link to content for different reasons.
We also looked at different social networks to see if there were more positive correlations for specific networks. We found no strong positive correlation of shares to referring domain links across the different networks as shown below.
- Facebook total interactions 0.0221
- Twitter 0.0281
- Linkedin 0.0216
- Pinterest 0.0065
- Google plus 0.0058
Whilst there is no correlation by social network there is some evidence that very highly shared posts have a higher correlation of shares and links. This can be seen below.
| Content sample | Average total shares | Median shares | Average referring domain links | Median referring domain links | Correlation total shares - referring domains |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full sample of posts (757,317) |
4,393 | 202 | 3.77 | 1 | 0.021 |
| Posts with over 10,000 total shares (69,114) |
35,080 | 18,098 | 7.06 | 2 | 0.101 |
The increased correlation is relatively small, however, it does indicate that very popular sites, other things being equal, would have slightly higher correlations of shares and links.
Our finding that there is no overall correlation contradicts previous studies that have suggested there is a positive correlation of shares and links. We believe the previous findings may have been due to inadequate sampling as we will discuss below.
The content sweet spot: content with a positive correlation of shares and links
Our research found there are specific content types that have a high correlation of shares and links. This content attracts both shares and links, and as shares increase so do referring domain links. Thus whilst content is generally shared and linked to for different reasons, there appears to be an overlap where some content meets the criteria for both sharing and linking.
The content that falls into this overlap area, our sweet spot, includes content from popular domains such as major publishers. In our sample the content also included authoritative, research backed content, opinion forming journalism and major news sites.
In our sample of 757,000 well shared posts the following were examples of domains that had a high correlation of shares and links.
| Site | Number of articles in sample | Referring domain links - total shares correlation |
|---|---|---|
| The Breast Cancer Site | 17 | 0.90 |
| New York Review of books | 11 | 0.95 |
| Pew Research | 25 | 0.86 |
| The Economist | 129 | 0.73 |
We were very cautious about drawing conclusions from this data as the individual sample sizes were very small. We therefore undertook a second, separate sampling exercise for domains with high correlations. This analysis is outlined in the next section below.
Our belief is that previous studies may have sampled content disproportionately from popular sites within the area of overlap. This would explain a positive correlation of shares and links. However, the data shows that the domains in the area of overlap are actually outliers when it comes to shares and links.
Sweet-spot content: opinion-forming journalism and research-backed content
In order to explore further the nature of content on sites with high correlations we looked at a further 250,000 random articles from those domains.
For example, we looked at 49,952 articles from the New York Times and 46,128 from the Guardian. These larger samples had a lower correlation of links and shares, as we would expect due to the samples having a lower level of shares overall. The figures were as follows:
|
Domain |
Number articles in sample |
Average Total Shares |
Average Referring Domain Links |
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Nytimes.com |
49,952 |
918 |
3.26 |
0.381 |
|
Theguardian.com |
46,128 |
797 |
10.18 |
0.287 |
We then subsetted various content types to see if particular types of content had higher correlations. During this analysis we found that opinion content from these sites, such as editorials and columnists, had significantly higher average shares and links, and a higher correlation. For example:
|
Opinion content |
Number articles in sample |
Average Total Shares |
Average Referring Domain Links |
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Nytimes.com |
4,143 |
3,990 |
9.2 |
0.498 |
|
Theguardian.com |
19,606 |
1,777 |
12.54 |
0.433 |
The higher shares and links may be because opinion content tends to be focused on current trending areas of interest and because the authors take a particular slant or viewpoint that can be controversial and engaging.
We decided to look in more detail at opinion forming journalism. For example, we looked at over 20,000 articles from The Atlantic and New Republic. In both cases we saw a high correlation of shares and links combined with a high number of referring domain links as shown below.
|
Domain |
Number articles in sample |
Average Total Shares |
Average Referring Domain Links |
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
TheAtlantic.com |
16,734 |
2,786 |
18.82 |
0.586 |
|
NewRepublic.com |
6,244 |
997 |
12.8 |
0.529 |
This data appears to support the hypothesis that authoritative, opinion shaping journalism sits within the content sweet spot. It particularly attracts more referring domain links.
The other content type that had a high correlation of shares and links in our original sample was research backed content. We therefore sampled more data from sites that publish a lot of well researched and evidenced content. We found content on these sites had a significantly higher number of referring domain links. The content also had a higher correlation of links and shares as shown below.
|
Domain |
Number articles in sample |
Average Total Shares |
Average Referring Domain Links |
Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
FiveThirtyEight.com |
1,977 |
1,783 |
18.5 |
0.55 |
|
Priceonomics.com |
541 |
1,797 |
11.49 |
0.629 |
|
PewResearch.com |
892 |
751 |
25.7 |
0.4 |
Thus whilst overall there is no correlation of shares and links, there are specific types of content that do have a high correlation of shares and links. This content appears to sit close to the center of the overlap of shares and links, our content sweet spot.
The higher correlation appears to be caused by the content achieving a higher level of referring domain links. Shares are generally much easier to achieve than referring domain links. You have to work much harder to get such links and it appears that research backed content and authoritative opinion shaping journalism is better at achieving referring domain links.
Want shares and links? Create deep research or opinion-forming content
Our conclusion is that if you want to create content that achieves a high level of both shares and links then you should concentrate on opinion forming, authoritative content on current topics or well researched and evidenced content. This post falls very clearly into the latter category, so we will shall see if this proves to be the case here.
The impact of content format on shares and links
We specifically looked at the issue of content formats. Previous research had suggested that some content formats may have a higher correlation of shares and links. Below are the details of shares and links by content format from our sample of 757,317 posts.
|
Content Type |
Number in sample |
Average Total Shares |
Average Referring Domain Links |
Correlation of total shares & referring domain links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
List post |
99,935 |
10,734 |
6.19 |
0.092 |
|
Quiz |
69,757 |
1,374 |
1.6 |
0.048 |
|
Why post |
99,876 |
1,443 |
5.66 |
0.125 |
|
How to post |
99,937 |
1,782 |
4.41 |
0.025 |
|
Infographic |
98,912 |
268 |
3.67 |
0.017 |
|
Video |
99,520 |
8,572 |
4.13 |
0.091 |
What stands out is the high level of shares for list posts and videos.
By contrast the average level of shares for infographics is very low. Whilst the top infographics did well (there were 343 infographics with more than 10,000 shares) the majority of infographics in our sample performed poorly. Over 50% of infographics (53,000 in our sample) had zero external links and 25% had less than 10 shares in total across all networks. This may reflect a recent trend to turn everything into an infographic leading to many poor pieces of content.
What also stands out is the relatively low number of referring domain links for quizzes. People may love to share quizzes but they are less likely to link to them.
In terms of the correlation of total shares and referring domain links, Why posts had the highest correlation than all other content types at 0.125. List posts and videos also have a higher correlation than the overall sample correlation which was 0.021.
List posts appear to perform consistently well as a content format in terms of both shares and links.
Some content types are more likely to be shared than linked to
Surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the potential to go viral with high shares. However, this form of content is far less likely to achieve links.
Entertaining content such as Vine videos and quizzes often had zero links despite very high levels of shares. Here are some examples.
|
Content |
Total Shares |
External Links |
Referring Domain Links |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Vine video |
347,823 |
0 |
0 |
|
Vine video |
253,041 |
0 |
1 |
|
Disney Dog Quiz |
259,000 |
0 |
1 |
|
Brainfall Quiz |
282,058 |
0 |
0 |
Long form content consistently receives more shares and links than shorter-form content
We removed videos and quizzes from our initial sample to analyze the impact of content length. This gave us a sample of 489,128 text based articles which broke down by content length as follows:
| Length (words) | No in sample | Percent |
|---|---|---|
| <1,000 | 418,167 | 85.5 |
| 1-2,000 | 58,642 | 12 |
| 2-3,000 | 8,172 | 1.7 |
| 3,000-10,000 | 3,909 | 0.8 |
We looked at the impact of content length on total shares and domain links.
| Length (words) | Total Shares Average | Referring Domain Links Average |
|---|---|---|
| <1,000 | 2,823 | 3.47 |
| 1-2,000 | 3,456 | 6.92 |
| 2-3,000 | 4,254 | 8.81 |
| 3-10,000 | 5,883 | 11.07 |
We can see that long form content consistently gets higher average shares and significantly higher average links. This supports our previous research findings, although there are exceptions, particularly with regard to shares. One such exception we identified is IFL Science, that publishes short form content shared by its 21m Facebook fans. The site curates images and videos to explain scientific research and findings. This article examines how they create their short form viral content. However, IFLS Science is very much an exception. On average long form content performs better, particularly when it comes to links.
When we looked at the impact of content length on the correlation of shares and links. we found that content of over 1,000 words had a higher correlation but the correlation did not increase further beyond 2,000 words.
| Length (words) | Correlation Shares/Links |
|---|---|
| <1,000 | 0.024 |
| 1-2,000 | 0.113 |
| 2-3,000 | 0.094 |
| 3,000+ | 0.072 |
The impact of combined factors
We have not undertaken any detailed linear regression modelling or built any predictive models but it does appear that a combination of factors can increase shares, links and the correlation. For example, when we subsetted List posts to look at those over 1,000 words in length, the average number of referring domain links increased from 6.19 to 9.53. Similarly in our original sample there were 1,332 articles from the New York Times. The average number of referring domain links for the sample was 7.2. When we subsetted out just the posts over 1,000 words the average number of referring domain links increased to 15.82. When we subsetted out just the List posts the average number of referring domain links increased further to 18.5.
The combined impact of factors such as overall site popularity, content format, content type and content length is an area for further investigation. However, the initial findings do indicate that shares and/or links can be increased when some of these factors are combined.
You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:
Download the full 30-page research report
Steve will be discussing the findings at a Mozinar on September 22, at 10.30am Pacific Time. You can register and save your place here https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/41189941...
For all of you reading this post and downloading the complete study:
Please, pass them (or a resumed version of them) to yours CMOs, and explain them to your clients.
Repeat these as a mantra:
Remember what is written in the post:
"There is NO correlation of shares and links".Therefore, choose format over the base of the results you want... which means that you must think strategically.
Sometimes is better investing money in few planned 10X content and not in building a blog, which you or your client won't be able to maintain or to provide with meaningful posts.
Couldn't agree more Gianluca. The CMOs always wants prove and strong data to make decision. Quite sure, this research will certainly help.
This comment here just accurately summed up everything in my head! With an extra topping of humor! I shake my head a little when an agencies solution to future backlinks is "get a blog"....
Hey Steve
Cool study. Certainly maps to what we see in the small business space. Folks are publishing because they feel they have to but there is little passion or strategy behind it and as such it does little to help the overall marketing goals or SEO.
It would be super interesting to see how the larger sites and general site popularity fairs here. There are sites where utter dross can be published and folks are going to link to it but in general it will be the
You have to do something out of the ordinary - another news story or 'me too' style of post on a small site will go by largely unnoticed and without links.
The amplification element is important also. If you are a small site and you create something awesome you really have to work hard to let folks know. Who would link to this? How do you make them aware of it? In some industries (like this one) this is relatively easy as there are so many engaged folks looking for cool content to share and talk about. In other industries it is not so easy.
Again, we come back to strategy - we have to understand why we are creating the content. Are we looking for links? If so we need to research and understand what works in a given industry and create something that is built around this perceived goal and has a plan to get the content in front of folks who would link to it.
Content marketing can be a hard proposition for smaller companies from a pure SEO perspective but there can still be benefits to sharing expert advice and knowledge - it is just important to understand and be realistic about what you want to get out of it.
Cheers - enjoyed this post. :)
Marcus
Greatly said Marcus. I believe that's the truth.
Certainly maps to what we see in the small business space. Folks are publishing because they feel they have to but there is little passion or strategy behind it and as such it does little to help the overall marketing goals or SEO...
Content marketing can be a hard proposition for smaller companies from a pure SEO perspective but there can still be benefits to sharing expert advice and knowledge - it is just important to understand and be realistic about what you want to get out of it.
For most small businesses -- especially B2C ones such as restaurants -- content marketing is usually the wrong strategy to use in the first place. If I owned a pizza parlor, I'd use a marketing mix of creative advertising and publicity over content marketing any day (after optimizing my website for technical and local SEO). The marketing mix would need to answer this question: How can I get mass attention from the people in my city or area?
Even small B2B gets it wrong with content marketing when they focus on a national audience dominated by large players. I have a local VoIP company that wants to write all their marketing for a national audience - but 50% of their business is within 50 miles of their one location. Trying to get them to hyper localize their content seems like common sense, but can be an uphill battle for small biz : /
Facebook sponsored posts seem to be the cheapest and most effective to syndicate content to your target market. I'm also using Twitter and content networks like Outbrain, but Fb has the lowest CPM or CPC.
If your post is really good, then a $5 sponsored Facebook post can generate a lot of shares and traffic.
Yes you are right buddy fb sponsored works well. I got enough traffice from them with lowest cpc.
Totally agree that one needs to be driven by STRATEGY - and one needs to appreciate that writing a blog is not a strategy but an initiative which will fail unless delivering to a carefully orchestrated strategy. For SME business, a blog is certainly a good idea - not for building links but for getting in front of yur target market, building your brand. Beyond that anything is pure bonus.
This remind me of Bob Dylan "Things have changed"
People are crazy and times are strange
I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
The reality is that today is different before 10 years ago (2005). Today people are lazy and only give social shares to your article, very little percent of them will link to your article. Before 10 years ago there wasn't social networks (except MySpace and LinkedIn) and people used blogs, forums and online chats. Believe me or not - this gives lot of links to article and PageRank do it's works well. Yes we talk about pre-Penguin times where every links count.
Today even veterans blogs less than before, most of them share articles directly in social networks. I remember that in 2005 i blog 2-3 times weekly, today i hard make 1 post per month (and sometimes didn't blog 2-3 months).
And same happens on sharing to social network. After initial rush people seems to refine their "shareability" and give shares, comments or likes only to extraordinary (10X in Rand's terminology) articles.
This is absolutely amazing!
Great study Steve, that's very true to take the proper steps while writing contents that ultimately lead to more shares.
One of the best studies I have read!
What it outlines is that most people are failing if they think an average article is going to cut it - it wont! You need to get creative - answer questions - write something that hasn't been written before - don't stop at 500 words (in fact, don't stop at 1000!) - write what had a good chance to be shared (and linked!) - Research!
-Andy
TL;DR: write ~1500 words long "why" research articles that refer to interesting statistics and have a strong opinion about the subject. :-)
One theory about why you may have seen such a low correlation between shares & links. If you're examining 750,000 pieces of content independent of domain, there's a lot of noise that occurs based on the publisher.
For instance, I've written a few articles for Entrepreneur.com, one time they accidentally tweeted a preview link to my article. It wasn't even up yet and garnered something like 300 tweets. Conversely, when I publish on my own blog, I don't have the following (or bots) to distribute my content socially, so in comparison to an entrepreneur article, the shares are really low.
However, if you said "on this given domain, is there a correlation between shares & links" I think you might arrive at a different conclusion. My well-linked articles do tend to have more shares (on the same domain) than those that aren't.
Obviously just conjecture, but it might be worth looking at the correlation on a domain-by-domain basis, then taking a mean average?
I love this research. Awesome job.
EDIT: Partial read, apologies if I mention something covered in the article. Bookmarking for later.
DOUBLE EDIT: Couldn't wait, read the whole thing. They cover this point exceptionally well.
Steve, many thanks for your post and all the work behind it! I'm sure this entry get tons of shares and likes and tweets and so :) By the way, I totally agree with Gianluca's comment above: there are many many blogs with just crappy content which never will be linked, shared, etc.
This is a profound and important evaluation of how content format impacts links and shares. Thank you!
The CL team will be drawing from this well for weeks - if we try things that work we will share in this thread :)
So I'm eager to combine some of the format types defined above with linkable topics we currently work within... Until now we've primarily focused on how-to type content but I am eager to see what could happen with an opinion-based format instead... just have to make sure we have an opinion from someone who our audience values of course...
I would greatly value an added "lens" to the above data set though - namely topic. Health vs. Business vs. Education, etc...
My gut is that different topics skew dramatically differently in the shares/links continuum.
Here's some Garrett preachiness >> In our experience links/resource page curators (in service of their website visitors) have different motivations and content evaluation criteria from someone who may share on a Facebook page or on Twitter.
While I know Steve is not suggesting we all start creating content of the same format, I do feel that in general it's best to design linkable content with some knowledge of the topics supported by large quantities of potential linkers (we call them linkable topics and/or linker-valued audiences). I think I echo Gianluca's sentiment when I say that format alone is not enough to earn links.
Hi Garrett
Unfortunately we didn't look at correlations/shares etc, by topic in this study but I agree it would be a good way to cut the data and analyze it. I also agree that format alone is simply not enough, you need in-depth knoweldge of the topics and the ability to bring something new through research or opinion.
Thanks for your comment Steve, and for all the research and analysis! So if you ever decide to dig in topically please let me know - I'd enjoy sharing our anecdotal findings (aka our hypothesis ;) on linkable topics over the past few years.
Very insightful report.
Quizzes are far easier to produce than a well researched or opinion forming article. The ROI, all things considered, is much higher as well. Gonna start trying with this content formant ASAP.
Oh, and what about images in articles? I'm guessing you didn't measure the impact of, say, two images within a 1000+ words article, versus 3-4... Or moreover what type of images- stats, graphs etc.
Great study btw, link to share ratio has always puzzled me.
Thanks, just on images in articles we have looked at this before in research we did for Canva. In this article you can see the impact of multiple images https://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-yo... Basically images every 75-100 words get high shares.
Picture list posts do particularly well on shares, see https://buzzsumo.com/blog/why-picture-list-posts-are-the-perfect-content-formula/
Great. How many links and shares this post will get? I think it will be harder on shares ;)
This is very informative and insightful article but it has verify my opinion about the future trend about the internet. Videos is the new trend because i have notice that articles don't interest people anymore even if they are over 1000 words because most people don't have the time to read that long but with video the 1000 words articles can be summarize in less than 3 mins
Thank you for the incredible work and super valuable data. I am very interested in "the ROI discussion" and in your opinion about that.
From the study I don't see where the main efforts from the content provider are and where/if ever the content become independent from it and real users overtake the task. Said differently, it would be interesting to see how shares and links increase in correlation to (paid) promotion, including IMO links from partnerships / domains from the same provider.
That's probably easier to measure for shares. Is BuzzSumo's database giving any hints on that?
(My considerations starts from the assumption that better shared/linked-to content also generates more revenues...)
Hi
Thanks, unfortunately we didn't look at paid promotion as we don't have that data but I think it is an interesting area to review. I suspect the results of paid promotion vary considerably but we would need to look at the data. What is clear is that social networks now drive a lot more traffic (more than search according to Shareaholic) thus appearing in social feeds would appear to be important. Acheiving this organically is also increasingly difficult so it could be that paid promotion in social feeds is becoming an important part of promotion strategies. At BuzzSumo we have found that retargeting ads in social feeds appear to generate both traffic and conversions.
Really i liked it. I hope some more case study in future. Even i suggest another case study for "What is correlation between links vs Turst Flow"?
Thanks for this, finally I have something to back up my ideas when discussing with clients content marketing strategies.
I think people who publish such twiter only interested in what they published and never look at the rest of the tweets,
How useful are social networks?
Thank you for this analysis. I am somewhat of a novice article marketer and have been exposed to many opinions about the ranking of articles in search engines with respect to the article’s length, format and quality content.
This in depth analysis exposes the weakness of my own work and that of most of my competitors. Now I have some hard evidence to guide my marketing efforts. I will be incorporating your analysis in my future work. I have also included a link to your article in my newsletter. Perhaps it will enlighten other article marketers.
Very good article Steve. Thanks for sharing
Thank you for sharing this information! I wonder if people are overwhelmed by the amount of information out there that most comments are links are lost over the internet.
I'm agree with you, shares and likes in social networks are nowadays one of the most important things to have a good position in search engines.
Lots of good points here by several people. It's hard to commit to writing a really great article. It takes a lot of time. But if you can write a long, comprehensive article, such as a "how to" article, it can generate traffic for years because of the links and shares you will get.
Parabéns pela ótima pesquisa e pelo fantástico artigo. As informações são bastante valiosas.
Wonderful analysis. Thanks for the detailed information.
I should say you bring a valuable report from your research.
Whatever information that came from a real analysis will for sure bring to the real fact.
Thanks for sharing.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for sharing this study. It's great for getting discussion going.
For those focussed on getting links for SEO purposes an important take away is that content that gets a lot of shares will not necessarily get links so think about your content types and linking audience.
Forgive me if your data covers this but is there any correlation between the flipside of the equation i.e does content that gets a lot of links also get social shares?
I ask this in the context of trying to understand why, if your study is correct, ranking correlation studies (e.g Moz, SearchMetrics) consistently show a correlation between social shares and rankings? The conclusion has always been that this correlation is not causation and that it's because of content with links also having shares. Does your study show this?
Thanks for any light you can shed on this subject.
Hi
Across all content there was no correlation between links and shares. Thus content that got more links didn't necessarily get more social shares. There were exceptions such as those I highlighted eg new research studies. The study doesn't suggest there is any causation though more work could be done here to look at social shares and rankings.
Thanks Steve. Interesting!
Perhaps the correlation between social shares and rankings observed in Moz and SM studies isn't one that's actually down to links as they speculate. Their speculations would seem to be based on the assumption that content with shares is also likely to have links and your study blows that theory to pieces...
Rand discusses the point here:
Using Social Media as Your Primary (or Only) Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday
I am very curious about the impact that experience has on links, shares, etc. I don't mean UX, but rather how design extends the experience that "content" provides.
Examples of what I mean include NYT's Snow Fall, The Guardian's Firestorm, or (more apropos to this audience), LouderThanTen's Design Machines. Each possess elements that your research says produce more shares / links (e.g. length, research). Each is also uniquely immersive and in this sense, the design each piece possesses extends the story it tells.
Design-enhanced storytelling still feels like an outlier (I'd love to hear about other examples, if any come to mind) in the context of content marketing. Many, many blog posts incorporate video or graphics to tell their story, but these lack the editorial backbone of the examples provided here (I'm not forgetting about guides, like Moz's SEO Guide).
These examples present bigger production efforts and costs, but with the Design Machines piece in particular, I see a stand-out example for the potential of content marketing.
I am having a problem with the interpretation of the data. It seems to suggest the only reason one might want to create content is to earn links and shares when that's rarely the case. Content increases long-tail and repeat traffic to your website and can coax visitors down the conversion funnel.
That said, I’m glad (thrilled!) to see a study that supports the belief that content marketing, by itself, won’t earn natural links. This is incredibly valuable! I'd love to see a follow-up comparison of a random sample of published content compared to content that has been created in the context of an overall strategy, optimized and promoted.
Hi Donna
Thanks, sorry I wasn't trying to suggest that the only reason to create content is to earn shares and links. The aim was simply to look at which content did and didn't achieve shares and/or links. I can compare content from specific sites to the random sample to review how it did in terms of shares and links. I think you are right though that content which is part of a clear strategy and which has been promoted and amplified will do better. It would appear that a lot of content is poorly amplified and promoted, or may simply not be shareworthy or linkworthy. Original research, long form content and opinion forming journalism were forms of content that appear to be better at earning shares and links naturally.
Good article! The reports are very useful. Today we have lots of information and that's the reason why we need quality content.
Great stuff, Steve and team. Must've been a lovely summer with this study.
I can't really say I'm surprised by how little amplification is being done these days. It just seems like everyone heard "make great content" and just started making a bunch of content, hit publish and then pray that it turns into an overnight sensation with a million shares and backlinks.
One thing to consider is that while longer content seems to have more shares and more links, the solution isn't necessarily to create longer form content. There is likely a higher probability that content requiring more investment to create receives more amplification efforts.
This is a good point. It is not long form content for long form's sake. There may be more investment in long form content including research and the posts may also be more in-depth and comprehensive. I like to think that such investment in content will be rewarded with both shares and links.
Steve, when you were measuring links, were you counting only followed links? Because sharing a link on Facebook is going to result in a nofollowed link back from each share. So...let's say a nofollowed link is worth 5% of what a followed one is (surely NOBODY still believes Google when they say there's no link value in a nofollowed link!), something that gets 1000 shares on Facebook essentially got the equivalent of 50 followed links.
Hi Michael,
To my knowledge, the Mozscape link data included all links - equity and non-equity. That said, Mozscape doesn't typically see a lot of links on Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin because of the closed ecosystems of those social networks. So even though nofollowed links are often generated through this social sharing activity - most of them are going to be invisible to us and search engines as well. Hope that makes sense!
The problem with that, Michael, like Cyrus said, is that Facebook is not friendly with Google, and in all likelihood, ensconces as much data from spiders as possible. Google and Twitter have a much closer relationship, though.
Thanks for sharing! This is why we do content inventories and audits for the purpose of pruning poorly-performing content from the index, or improving it if there is something worth improving. Most of the content out there is simply wasting space and dragging down the rankings of the rest of the content.
No of shares, likes or Tweets don't signifies the importance of content. I am sure many people will get to learn the importance of quality content instead of sharing a low quality content with others. @Steve undoubtedly your research is very very impressive, practically we can analyze it on daily basis. No of shares, the out bond link and quality of content all 3 different things but quality wise they are connected deeply.
Hey Steve_Rayson
Nice brother!
What has worked really nice for me recently is to give people the ‘steps’ to solving their problem, but then giving away something that makes the whole process a lot easier.
Strategically this is given away by either email (as most people do), but depending on the objective I would throw in the ‘pay with social media’ function.
Here is an example of me using Pay with a Tweet:
(My apologies for link dropping, but it’s the only way to show what I’m talking about for those that don’t know) – https://growthnerd.com/4-steps-reveal-your-ideal-customer/
In the above piece I wrote a nice meaty piece (using Scrivener – thanks to Appsumo ) on how to build a target customer profile. I go a step further then by giving away the actual template for getting it done easier.
It’s gotten really nice shares and solid spike in visitors. Got a few hundred unique visits from it and I didn’t market this to any influencers at all. Just tweeted about it, shared it on Facebook and Google+ and it went from there.
The key is to make sure your content is quality and that it solves a problem otherwise you’re not getting jack squat shared.
Regards
p.s – keep up the great posts!
Really appreciate your efforts in this study, great job! Not surprised at all to hear that most of the content on the web receives very little to no shares. There are countless of content producers and blog owners who just chase quick results (case in point with the sudden trend of Infographics over the last year!). Some will see this study and just go and write List format articles of 1,000+ words, and just expect great results...
Great research. I´m glad you guys joined forces. These kind of studies are important, so that marketers could be wiser. Thanks!
Steve,
Really good stuff, hats of to you, also congratulations for first post !
I want to say, these days people write contents for getting more and more shares, visits, likes, tweets, etc but don't know if you have zero share, then it does not mean you wrote wrong information. There are many popular sites which does not provided enough and valuable information but still they get almost same amount of shares for each blogs, why? Because they are getting many visits daily basis, and those visitors like to share their articles. I am not saying that everyone is equal but the race of being popular and getting maximum is share on the contents make audience stay away from the truth and actual information.
So, according to me whenever anyone think to write or share their experience to audience truly then just forget about the shares, visits, links, tweets, and then start writing, I am damn sure you will get more than expected result. (I can be wrong but I always write whatever in my mind and that's what I did in this comment)..
Thanks and keep it up Steve :)
Great study Moz and BuzzSumo Teams!
Ever since G stated content was King, there has been an influx of content to the web. Problem is, most of it is crap or stuff people dont want read. The more content being published, the harder it is to make the content different and stand out. Even if a piece of content is link worthy and shareable, how are people going to find it with amongst all the other content out there?
The challenge is not only producing great content, but also getting the great content in front of people who will read it, share it and link it in order to make it go "viral".
Makes sense that sharing is more popular and done more than linking as well. To share, one only needs to hit a button and move on. There is significantly much more involved with linking to a website, especially if those reading the content dont have their own website.
Thanks again guys!
As always, great information from BuzzSumo. Question, can Buzzsumo (software) isolate industry and identify top sites within it that have high share content?
On the BuzzSumo question you can run a content analysis report for various industry topics and the report will show you the most shared domains for each topic. You can do the same for authors eg run a top author report for a topic or domain and see the most shared authors. Hope that helps.
Thnxs for the help!
Interesting and very usuful post, but I'm not sure I fully understood the first finding, where it says "this suggests there is a lot of very poor content out there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content".
What is "poor content"? If it's content that people do not find interesting or useful to share, then a lot of fantastic stuff will never be considered "rich content"; think about a very good medical survey, or an article about a new cure for a desease: people may not be keen to share it just for privacy reasons.
On the other side, if "poor content" is content that is not following G. guidelines, the number of shares (and links) is again misleading. A cute kitties' gallery, or an article about beaches stuffed with stock images and copy & pastes may get a lof of shares, comment and even links, but will be soon or after cut out from the serps...
Imho, the mentioned finding may suggest that a big part of the content out there performs poorly in relation with shares and links because: is poor content, is poorly amplyfied, was not produced specifically to drive user's action. When it comes to write down a content strategy, I always try not to forget that shares and links need to get along well with organics....
Thanks, I think that is a fair point. What we found was that most content gets very few shares and even fewer links. It does not necessarily mean it is poor content though it would suggest it is poorly amplified. In fact new medical research does perform well in terms of links and new scientific research generally does well. Amplification is still required as there are over 5,000 peer reviewed scientific papers published each week.
Looks like it's another history making blog post in SEO industry. Now it's time to think about how to focus on research backed content and opinion forming journalism most effectively in your day to day SEO practice.
I'm new to blogging, and I can't still grasp the point that blog content cannot contribute much in providing useful shares than external links? You mean when people share your link content it get's more shares than posting it later on your blog?
I'm Amy blogger of ecigarettes reviews.
Excellent (and almost overwhelming) research data. IMHO, content marketing is fast becoming sort of the so-called notorious spammy link building practice with more and more agencies publishing content pieces that seem to have been crafted in a hurry and without second thoughts. Such a practice is becoming so rampant that's tending to create an information overload, making it harder for search engines and social media sites to process and filter the best from the rest.
Fabulous post! Thanks for sharing this wonderful article.
Of the content that actually received 1 or more shares, it would be interesting to explore what percentage was shared by real people with a genuine interest to spread the content. With so many automated tools that can spread content across networks automatically, trolls who just read headlines and share without really engaging or even those with ridiculously huge social networks, it would seem that sharing content that resonates with you and to your social audience would be significantly less.
There is a lot of discussion about thin content, but what about thin sharing? We only have so much time to consume content and of that even less time to filter out and share the stuff that really resonates. We tend to believe that because it's digital it can be shared more or requires a comment, but everything digital still has to pass through the bottleneck of human attention which statistically is going down not up. Our attention is finite and will always be - even if we're fully engaged. Imagine if the content of each share in our various social networks were converted to snail mail letters and delivered. It'd be impossible to read each one then share or respond to ones that really resonate plus get your job done. So for me, this dilutes the value of a digital share, regardless of the platform or manner in which it is being shared.
Hi Tim
I think the whole issue of automation is interesting. Clearly some people use tools that automate sharing without even reading articles or in some cases even reviewing the headlines before they are shared. The recent advice on feeds like Twitter is that there is so much noise you are actually best advised to post multiple times. However, in my view this has caused the Twitter feed to be almost link spam and I am not sure many people spend time in their feeds as a result. I do wonder if this may be one reason Twitter are removing share counts to discourage or at least remove one potential incentive to link drop. I personally suspect there may be more valuable engagement in other networks where there is a lower volume of link sharing but this is supposition on my part.
Nice Article Steve. Reports shows the importance of content quality mainly. So its been clear now that long form content is better than shorter form content. I just downloaded the report and i am going to show report to one of my client. Great work.
Great research guys!
Awesome research guys! thank you so much! Regards :)
I'm reading this... and it makes me want to throw up...
Not because of the research you've done (I'm quite impressed at least on the surface)... but by the conclusions this is teasing out..
It's utterly depressing - given how much time many of us spend making content... trying desperately to make "good content"...
And the smack upside the head conclusion (which is supported by your analytic analysis) is "...most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking. It also suggests that people are very poor at amplifying content... most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it."
I know I'm definitely one of them in the latter portion - I'm spending lots of time trying to figure out good amplification strategies... if for no other reason I'm not inclined to wait YEARS to "make it" (I think I saw a Video where Rand remembers it took six years for Moz to get off the ground... yet you look at something like Copyblogger... and that hasn't been around for more than 8... hence what's the difference? I think I know - but not sharing now. :D)
That said... I need to study this very closely... been awhile since I cracked out Stata and did some crunching (my former life I used to do that)...
I'm curious to know if Moz/BuzzSumo would be willing to make their data public. There are some rather sweeping conclusions made... with somewhat glossy language. I'd really be interested in seeing the data...
I'm also again - very discouraged by what's written here. What it says is basically I have a better chance being cracked on the head with an asteroid from a galaxy 20 million light years away... than getting my content to even get a few links on it...
... that's not exactly a happy happy joy joy moment - now is it. What your research suggests is - Moz is the Bumblebee - as is Copyblogger, CMI, C&C, etc., none of you should exist... since it's utterly random anything you ever do winds up amounting to more than a "meh!" by the internet community. Since history doesn't ultimately support that conclusion (at least not anetcdotally)... what's missing...
If I'm jumping the gun because I haven't read it all detailed enough - I apologize... but I wanted to pipe up and say something before the 92 "WOW! this is is the coolest thing ever!" remarks flood the posting...
... I for one find this cool... and quite discouraging... :(
On the plus side there are inspiring examples of people creating content which is well researched, well argued and which gets well shared and linked to. However, the data does show that the majority of content gets few shares and fewer links. We have attempted to understand why content gets shares and links, so you don't have to wait for that asteroid. I was conscious to heavily caveat these findings and show the data behind each finding. However, I think there is evidence that things are not utterly random and that for example, well researched content that provides genuine new insights or serious journalism that argues a viewpoint will gain more shares and links. I crunched this data in R, and would be happy to take you through it.
OK so I've read this in more detail...
Couple of thoughts I'd love for Steve to respond to...
Why did you (or anyone) hypothesize that more shares equal more links? In particular, you focus on sites that are largely consumed by pop-culture readers - the NYT and Buzzfeed. Yeah ok, if I want "21 Ways fruit looks like boobs!" - great... Buzzfeed. If I want "21 Ways the Republicans are idiots" from the NYT - great. Neither site is at all representative of the vast majority of content being created...
So thinking this through practically - if I'm a "linker" - who am I... I'm most likely a blogger of some kind. Or I'm some other writer/journalist/whatever. Right? I mean the person reading "21 Ways Boobs look like Fruit" - may like the heck out of it - may share the heck out of it on Facebook... but is it reasonable to presume that person is going to quickly whip open Wordpress and write "Yes, Boobs are indeed like Fruit! Here's why!" and then cite the Buzzfeed article? No... not really...
I guess what I'm dancing around at here is - you have sample bias. Content is not content is not content - it's not homogenous. So what you find is "content that is journalistic and/or opinion forming gets good shares and links"... and I guess I'm thinking "well duh... that makes some degree of sense."
I mean think about it - those of us who are going to link to things are looking for either a) thought leadership that supports whatever it is we're trying to write, or b) factual research that supports whatever it is we're trying to write. I mean for example - if I write about the abysmal share and amplification, I'm going to link to this study... I cannot see any reason why I'd link to 21 Ways Boobs looks like Fruit (as fun as that article will indeed be to write).
Your own tables are what made me think about that. I mean seriously - the readers of the NYT compared to Buzzfeed compared to TechCrunch? Compared to Hubspot? I mean seriously - who the heck reads Hub's blog and is also perusing Buzzfeed or the NYT (ok - well me maybe - Hub and Buzzfeed)... but when I'm in Buzzfeed I'm not looking for stuff to link to - and when I'm at Hubspot I'm not looking for 21 Ways Kids are Like Little Drunk People (which is a fabulously funny article list btw). So my focus is entirely different - my general predisposition to one activity or another is conditioned by the nature of the content...
I mean it's like saying - there's no correlation between ice cream and veggie salad... well duh... when I want veggie salad I eat veggie salad... and when I want ice cream - I most certainly don't want veggie salad.
Plus - let's look at the ones where you hit "jackpot" on links and shares. Breast Cancer site. Ok - wow - of course... people go there for answers... people are writing about it. And Aunt Ginny just got diagnosed - let me send her the article I found. Same mindset could also be said for Pew Research... and the Economist. As for why the New York Review of Books does so well - I actually think you have a sample anomaly there - we're talking about people who love words... so of course - they're probably all blogging... they all have their favorites... and they all cite the NYTRB to support whatever the authors they like are writing... honestly... it doesn't shock me...
The broader your audience gets (as you move into the NYT and Guardian) - the worse everything gets. This is in large part I think a factor of audience diffusion and audience behavior diffusion. In short - the content doesn't satisfy the itch as well as perhaps something else... so it doesn't get great shares or great links in comparison to the other things you cite...
btw - one thing your research makes abundantly evident - knowing your audience is actually the key to getting anything shared, liked, or linked... when the content is a diffused match - your correlations drop nearly to zero it looks like...
I'm also going to point out that you've got domains and sights -such as TNR and Atlantic... now - I'm not a lefty... but I know those publications rather well. That audience is hardly typical of who's on the internet. Those people again are most likely to not only be writers (professionally or otherwise) but also hounds who are clippers and linkers... honestly, I'm surprised their linkages aren't higher... but for the fact that I suspect their audience as it ages is just not as active...
Again - I think this is really good stuff... but I would like to know how you corrected for these biases in your analysis. You focused alot of your effort on content type and domain rank, etc., but it seems like you might have missed the ball on actually looking at how the general content buckets are consumed and seeing if that has any impact...
... so... thoughts?
Previous surveys have suggested there is a positive correlation of shares and links, and this is what we set out to explore in the study. In terms of the sample we looked at 1m articles across 600,000 different domains. Thus we covered a broad range of content and you are right of course that different content appeals to different audiences. I suspect you are also right that some audiences are more likely to link. However, if you take the New York Times as an example their audience is three times as likely to share and link to opinion content as other content on the site. Equally the same audience is much more likely to link to longer form content than short form content. Thus whilst the audience may well have an impact on the propensity to link to content, it seems that the nature of the content is also an important factor.
We didn't really hit the jackpot in focusing on sites like The Breast Cancer Site or the Atlantic etc. We identified sites in the sample of 600,000 domains that had high correlations of links and shares to see what, if anything, they had in common and what we could learn from them. These sites, along with the research sites like Pew, had much higher correlations of shares and links than average. This is the reason we then looked at these sites in more detail, it wasn't a question of bias or of wanting to focus on specific sites. We simply looked at the sites that had a high correlation of shares and links to see what we might learn. I hope that explains why we chose to look at these particular sites in more detail.
This response is gold. Thanks for sharing Bryan. Reminds us not to jump on bandwagons and make our own decisions about what a study and data is showing us.
Thanks for the study Steve. Brilliant for getting discussion going.
Now I'm thinking this post is half an opinion and mix with half of research.
I agree with this.
My big take home point from this article is "If you're a small business that's either local or doesn't have a huge amount of time and cognitive resources to devote towards content creation then don't waste your time."
I mean seriously, if you're talking to a plumber or a nail spa, what's the benefit of blogging vs. sending out coupons in the mail or paying someone to stand on the corner with a sign and some free samples?
I'm a relatively successful business blogger and after reading this I'm more convinced to not do more content marketing in lieu of more direct forms of advertisement like mailing campaigns and cold calling. I'm more likely to get a valuable sale with a week of cold calling than I am with a week of blogging.
Most small business owners are not technically literate and don't have the chops to produce "opinion forming journalism." They're not going to be able to afford someone that could produce that either with their advertising budget, which is probably a few hundred dollars per month.
The article also infers that content is not shared because it's not high quality. I suspect most of the time that's true because most content is very thin. What would be more interesting to study is the attention received by articles of comparable quality. My guess is that their distribution would follow an equally steep power law and the difference between the ones that got huge amplification is very small and often negligible.
Ie, it's stochastic. The results can be analyzed post facto but the distribution of results within a comparable set is random enough that they can't be predicted beforehand. This effect is not uncommon. Usually when a breakthrough academic paper takes the world by storm there are 10 or 12 comparable articles published around the same time that either heavily contributed to the study that hit it big or reported results that literally showed the same thing......but didn't amplify because it didn't tap into a network effect to blow it up. So one author feasts and gets a huge book deal and the other 30 working on the same thing toil away as associate professors making 40k/year and working 50 hours a week.
Same with companies. Usually when there's a breakthrough firm it's competing with many others in the same space and the differences between them before they get big are small enough that you can't predict the winner when the tournament begins. Post facto you can retrace what they did well and use it as an example of how to accomplish X but it ignores the chance that was necessary on the margin to separate them from everyone else.
I would be surprised if this wasn't the case with content marketing and the big, fat power law displayed by these results.
So the idiom "See, look.....you have to make sure your content is really good and work extra hard to make sure it gets shares and then everything will be alright" isn't relevant to most business owners. Trying to create singularly brilliant content (even once) is beyond the reach of most people and the capriciousness of the network effect necessary to make sure it goes somewhere means for most companies in most industries the majority of content marketing advice doesn't amount to a hill of beans.
Get a squarespace site with basic local SEO put in place, get a facebook and instagram page to post pretty pictures of whatever it is that you make, and then go out and hustle using traditional customer acquisition methods is the advice I'd give the median business owner after reading this article.
You won't set the world on fire but you'll at least be able to make reasonable forecasts about how effective you'll be and results are more likely to be proportional to the effort you put in and unlike content marketing, you can consistently put in incremental amounts of effort and have success even if that stroke of genius never comes.
I don't think you should necessarily be discouraged. This study didn't look at the effects of content promotion. A content marketing strategy includes (or should include) ways to get your content in front of an audience that is ready to share, link, or convert, depending on your objective(s).
good