We Analyzed 5,860,631,392 Articles From 64 Countries. Here’s What Facebook Loves!

You can still generate traffic from Facebook. Before I dive into what we have learned, there are few things you ought to know about the data: Technically we have gathered social sharing data on 11,721,262,784 articles. There’s been countless articles published showing that list posts and infographics generate the most social shares. But what if you want social shares over time? You already know people love images. When we looked at the average share count based on list size, it was clear that lists that were 10 items long won. And every time you expand upon the article, you can share it again on Facebook. Over time, evergreen content gets more traffic. I used to love writing articles that pushed fear because they generated a lot of traffic for me. People prefer sharing content on Tuesday over any other day.

Facebook reach has continually declined over time.

Nowadays everyone tells me there is no point in even sharing content on Facebook.

But you know what? You can still generate traffic from Facebook.

Yes, traffic has declined. Even so, in the last 31 days, I’ve generated 20,420 visits from Facebook.

That’s not too shabby considering I’m only publishing 4 articles a month. That’s an average of 5,105 visitors per article from Facebook.

And because I’ve been building the ultimate SEO tool, I’ve been gathering social sharing data on over 9 billion URLs.

But a large portion of the URLs in our database aren’t articles. So, for this analysis, we looked at 5,860,631,392 articles.

Before I dive into what we have learned, there are few things you ought to know about the data:

Technically we have gathered social sharing data on 11,721,262,784 articles. For each URL we gather data on the HTTP and the HTTPS version to get an accurate count as more sites have transitioned to HTTPS over time.
We only looked at articles. A lot of URLs such as nike.com have over a million Facebook shares, but they aren’t articles.
We looked at articles in multiple languages as English isn’t the main language everyone speaks in the world.
When I say “social shares”, that includes reactions, comments, and shares from Facebook.
We excluded scraper sites. A lot of the articles shared on Facebook are scraper sites. They barely have any shares and it skews the data.
In total, the 5,860,631,392 articles came from 163,968,722 domains.
Our list of articles started with Google search results. Because we have data on 507,348,976 search engine results from 64 different countries, we were then able to find the sites that you read on a regular basis, which then helped us crawl and find more articles that you may read.

Let’s dive into the learnings.

What type of content generates the most Facebook likes overtime?

There’s been countless articles published showing that list posts and infographics generate the most social shares.

And that makes sense because who doesn’t love a visual piece of content such as an infographic?

But what if you want social shares over time?

By looking at how many social shares each article generates on a monthly basis, we were able to see the growth rate and the types of article that generate the most social shares over time.

Here’s the share growth rate over time per article type:

If you want a quick boost in Facebook traffic, consider creating infographics.

But if you want more consistent Facebook traffic each and every month, focus on “how to” articles. They don’t do as well right off the bat, but over time they produce more consistent Facebook traffic.

The reason for this is that infographics are harder to rank on Google because they don’t contain a lot of text.

By creating content like “how to” articles that tend to get searched frequently, you can get consistent traffic to your articles which will cause more social shares.