Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing There’s no escaping content if you want to survive in the digital marketing realm. Wheth
There’s no escaping content if you want to survive in the digital marketing realm. Whether you create content or curate it, you have to ensure that it serves a purpose. Irrespective of the industry, the content that you create has to increase brand awareness, generate leads, boost sales, make an impact on the target audience, trigger reactions, and enhance search engine rankings.
But there’s no “one content to rule them all.” If your content doesn’t strike the right chord, it’ll simply be a waste of resources. Content saturation is a real thing, which is evident from these numbers provided in an infographic by Adweek:
- An average social network user processes – 63% text content and 37% media content.
- 54000 words are not only the length of an average novel but are also a number of words dumped on a user daily. The number is 443 minutes for video content.
Ergo, to rise above the rest, your content must make an impact. This can be done in two ways –
| Create Sharable Content | Create Linkable Content |
| Sharable content is quickly consumed and triggers user interactions such as – likes, shares, reactions, tags, hearts, mentions, retweets, reposts etc.
More often than not, sharable content is fun, witty, compelling, inspiring, trendy and engaging. It often resonates with what people know or would want to know more about. It gives them something to talk about and connect with their community. Memes, quotes, quiz, short snippets, pop culture articles, short videos, recipes, listicles are examples of sharable content. There are lots of visuals in the content and offer easy readability. Catchy headlines that grab users’ attention is another trademark of such content. Buzzfeed, Cracked.com, Reddit, Tumblr etc. have plenty of sharable content on their platform. |
Linkable content, on the other hand, is a highly-researched resource. It needn’t necessarily be a source of quick information or entertainment and is often, serious and in-depth.
Creators of linkable content are seen as people who have authority and credible. Even though it may not attract much in terms of user interaction, the content is often used as a reference point and cited within other content or posts. Even though the content gets fewer shares, it never loses its value. It caters to a niche audience and never loses its importance. Tutorials, podcasts, demos, eBooks, resource guides, white papers, detailed infographics, case studies and even websites are examples of linkable content. |
While sharable content can be blatantly self-promotional, linkable content is more on the useful side. It can be entertaining, but at the same time, it also answers many questions that the reader might have.
For instance, take the example of The Oatmeal website, which is anything, but serious. However, it has a comic called How To Be A Writer. But what you see (in the headline) is not what you get! It can work as an ice-breaker sentence in a long-form content that gives tips on writing and so, it is placed within the content as a funny reference. And it can be used even after five years for now, in some or the other content due to its high entertainment factor.
Also, the importance of linkable content is clearly seen in a study done by Moz and Buzzsumo, in which they analyzed 1 million articles to analyze the relationship between shares and links:
- Over 50% of the posts had 2 or fewer interactions on Facebook. Over 75% of them had no external links. This points out to poor content and people don’t know how to give their content a boost.
- Although 85% of the content published (excluding the videos and quizzes) is below 1000 word-limit, long-form content that is over 1000 words long gets consistently shared and linked to than content with low word count.
- The format of the content matters too. For instance, entertainment videos and quizzes have a greater probability of getting shared but not linked. List posts and why posts achieve a higher number of referring domain links than other content formats on an average.
The first image…
COMMENTS