A summary of a recent blog post by Neil Patel. Neil is a New York Times Bestselling author; the Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web. Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and every other social network you can think of eventually does the same thing.
Can you guess what it is?
They adjust their algorithms to slow down reach and sharing. That means you won’t get as much traffic from them unless you start advertising (pay to play).
But even with their algorithm changes, there must be a way to maximize the traffic you can get from each social network, right?
In order to find out, we analyzed over 50,000 social media posts sharing content in 10 different industries.
We looked at these industries:
Business
E-commerce
Fashion
Food
Health
News
Politics
Sports
Technology
Travel
Analysis #1: Social media engagement for each industry over the last 12 months
The key highlight is that News-related posts had the most engagement followed by Sports and then Politics.
It’s worth noting that social media posts related to Business and E-commerce received virtually no engagement which might highlight some trends for both industries.
Even though News received the most total social media engagement, it was behind Politics when looking at the average engagement per post.
But as everyone knows, don’t talk about politics at the dinner table. In other words, you don’t want to polarize your audience.
Regardless of which industry you belong to, incorporating news-related subjects in your content could be a great way to get more engagement and traffic.
For example, if you own a music-related website, you may try to break news or write about it on your blog such as when Apple bought a company called Beats by Dre years ago. If the acquisition took place today, Apple would want to make sure their blog covered the move and then share it across their social media channels for added engagement.
Analysis #2: What type of content works best on social media networks?
For fun, we also looked at which industries performed the best on each social network in terms of shares.
No shocker, but Facebook and Twitter prefer News-related content. Pinterest, on the other hand, prefers content that is more visual so industries such as Fashion, Travel, and even Food performed better.
As I mentioned before, if you want to get more traffic from Facebook and Twitter, find ways to tie in News-related topics or events to your content. Even if you aren’t a part of the industry it can help you get traction.
But if you want more traffic from Pinterest, focus on anything that is visual.
Now, none of that is really eye-opening. So we decided to dig a bit deeper to see the types of content that were most popular on these platforms.
I would assume infographics would perform best as they are easily shareable and are easy to generate links to.
Funnily enough, infographics had the worst performance from a social standpoint. On the flip side, I would never have guessed that “why” posts and “interview” based posts would do so well.
List-based content is pretty much a given as everyone loves lists such as “The 7 benefits of green tea”.
As for the appeal of why-based posts, think of topics like “why isn’t there an eclipse every month” or “why don’t people wear white after labor day”.
For interviews, people want to hear from people who intrigue them. For example, if you were to be able to get an interview with business leaders like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, athletes like Lebron James or Cristiano Ronaldo, or even political figures who are trending at the time, you can bet it will get a lot of social shares.
Analysis #3: The relationship between total engagement and total shares of each industry
Some content gets shared a lot while others get a ton of engagement such as comments and likes. However, just because a piece of content gets a lot of comments, it doesn’t necessarily mean people like it and want to promote it to their network.
The more shares a piece of content has, the higher the chances are of you getting more traffic. If you create polarizing content, such as political content or sports-related content with a lot of diehard fans and haters, it doesn’t mean engagement alone will result in more traffic (it can but not always).
A great example of this is if I posted a piece of content on “Why the Los Angeles Lakers will win the NBA championship”. I will get tons of comments from people who support any one of the other 29 NBA teams on why I’m wrong and how their team has a better chance of winning.
Engagement on social media is great, but it can only take you so far. That is why the goal of this study is to figure out how to use social media sites to generate more organic traffic for your website and not just get “engagement”.
Analysis #4: How long should your content be and when should you share it?
Did you know that the average article that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 1,447 words?
It used to be around 3,000 words, then in the low 2,000s and now 1,447.
With social media, we wanted to see how long content should be to generate the most shares.
As you can see, they are short. Really short (700 words or less for most industries).
E-commerce had the highest word count, followed closely by Business. However, both of these industries had the lowest number of total engagements and total shares based on the previous charts I shared above.
Although Google may prefer long-form articles, people on social media prefer short articles over longer ones.
When you look at the articles people prefer sharing (not liking, but sharing), it is also clear that people prefer sharing shorter articles.
More than 90 percent of all content pieces shared on social media from this analysis were less than 2,000 words in length.
Getting someone to actively share an article is a lot rarer than simply clicking the “like” button. Keep in mind that people can share the same article over and over again.
As for when to release and promote your content, not all days are equal. It also varies per industry as well.
In general, people enjoy engaging with content most on Wednesdays followed by Thursdays and Tuesdays.
However, it isn’t that simple. Releasing content on Wednesday won’t guarantee success as it is different for each industry.
Lastly, the two most popular types of reaction for all industries were either “Haha” or “Love”.
Outside of News and Politics, where the top reaction was “Haha”, “Love” was the most popular reaction for all industries.
If you want your content to do well, create content that conveys the feeling of “love” or makes people laugh. Those are the two types of reactions that people want to give the most.
There were a lot of interesting findings from our research.
The big takeaway for me was to create why-based content and write short articles if you want to do well on social media.
In general, you’ll want to:
tie content to relevant news
create why-based content or interview well known figures
write shorter posts of 700 words or less to share on social media instead of 2,000+ word articles
promote your content on Wednesday (for most industries) to get the most engagement
create content that leverages the feeling of love or makes people laugh
Read Neil's blog in its entirety, https://neilpatel.com/blog/social-posts-organic-traffic/
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