During my recent content research I came across the ultimate social media marketers quiz. Here are three questions I have for you about this quiz:
- How many shares did the quiz get?
- How many people viewed the quiz?
- How many sites linked to it?
The answers are almost 8,000 shares, 5,500 views, and zero links. Yes, more people shared this quiz than viewed it and not a single person linked to it.
My next question is: Does the quiz drive traffic, build authority, and help conversions? It seems unlikely. By contrast, an article on content shock by Mark Schaefer received far fewer shares than the quiz (4,700), but gained links from over 900 domains. His post continues to attract new links and drive traffic every week.
These may be extreme examples, but it is increasingly clear that while shares are important, they are not enough to ensure content success. Social sharing is one part of the amplification process and content shares in themselves are not a measure of success. By contrast, content that gains both shares and links is much more likely to build authority and drive traffic.
In this post I take a look at the issues, including the importance of an amplification strategy and content that achieves both links and shares.
Content and social sharing
Content marketing is hard work. A recent survey found that brand marketers increased their publishing by 800% over the last five years but engagement per post declined by 89% over the same period.
In our own 2016 survey, we found that 50% of content published by the 95 top B2B sites received 106 shares or fewer. When we looked at another 100 B2B sites we found that 50% of the content received 22 shares or less.
The difficulty of generating social engagement is compounded by content growth and increasing volume of content competing for attention. Below is the growth in monthly blog posts published on WordPress over the last 10 years. Over 70 million blog posts are published each month on WordPress alone.
No amplification strategy means a poor return on your content investment
Publishing content and expecting people to find it simply doesn’t work anymore, if it ever did. As Rand Fishkin says, there’s no prize for hitting publish. Even publishing great, high-quality content is not enough.
One of the most common reasons for content failure is the lack of amplification. Content creators need to think about how and why their content will be amplified before they create it. Why will people share it? Why will they link to it? How will they find it?
Social sharing is not an amplification strategy
Social networks have become important content discovery platforms. Think about the articles you looked at today, how many did you find via a search engine and how many from a social network?
Social shares matter, but social sharing on its own is not an amplification strategy. Too many content marketers seem to think that getting people to share their content is an amplification strategy. While social shares are important, they have limitations:
- Most links shared on social are never clicked.
- Many people who share the articles don’t even view them, let alone read them. (Remember the quiz I referenced? It has more shares than views.)
- Social posts tend to have a limited shelf life. If you missed a tweet this morning, will you ever see it?
- Social sharing usually declines quickly in the days and weeks after content is published.
Even shares by influencers do not necessarily move the needle when it comes to generating traffic. Not all influencers are created equal. It is not uncommon for influencers to have 500,000 Twitter followers and an average retweet rate of just 15 or 20 followers. Thus, the tweet is only retweeted say 20 times, and the number of click-throughs could be even less.
An influencer’s number of followers is fairly meaningless. The best influencers for content amplification are those with good follower engagement and high retweet rates. You are much better off in a niche with an influencer who has a highly engaged but smaller audience than someone with hundreds of thousands of followers who rarely engage.
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