
The secret sauce for blog virality. Unexpected insights from 5,000 posts - mcaserta
http://blog.proven.com/virality-and-content-sharing
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joemellin
Great content!

Really interesting on the emotion/length/publish date.

For some of the graphs I would love to get some clarification.

EX: for " Number of shares per article lenght" is that average number of
shares per article of that length?

I think that is what it is as the average post seems to get around 70-80
shares.

The main question I have is on Social Shares by Publication Day, as it is in
the 400-600 is that "total shares per publication day?" or "average number of
shares per post on each day?" I ask because if it is the former then it may
just be that most people post on Tuesday so there are more shares on Tuesday.

Regardless awesome content would love to know more about the process behind it
looking at all the blog posts.

Ex did you build your own scraper or use one of the new ones from PH like
[https://www.producthunt.com/tech/crawly](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/crawly)

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seanf80
Thanks for the questions.

Both the number of shares per article length graph and the shares per day of
the week are averages, not the absolute values. I'll be sure to clarify that
in the post.

The crawlers were all custom written.

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Pablo1856
Thank you for posting this. Our CTO Sean Falconer did a great job with this!

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mcaserta
Hey Pablo, congrats for the article, really well written and extremely
interesting. I was wondering if you had any interesting input regarding what
is better for a blog between writing a short article every day or a longer in-
depth article once a week. Thanks, Michele

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seanf80
Hi Michele,

There's some different schools of thought on this.

A lot of content marketers and SEO experts recommend lots of articles
targeting long tail keywords. However, the newer thought process is to write
longer more in-depth articles and spend equal time promoting those articles.

As you can see from the article we published, we found longer articles lead to
more shares. Brian Dean found that content length impacts Google rankings
([http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors](http://backlinko.com/google-
ranking-factors)) and KissMetrics got a similar result as us in terms of
shares being correlated with longer articles
([https://blog.kissmetrics.com/share-on-social-
media/](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/share-on-social-media/)).

The sweet spot for the length depends on sharing source and the domain you are
writing about.

Thanks for your question.

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mcaserta
Hey Sean. This is pretty interesting. My only concern would be that longer
articles could be more difficult to "digest" for the reader and therefore less
engaging. I would expect a viral professional article to need to be long and a
viral casual article to need to be shorter. Is that something you have ever
researched ?

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prebrov
Sharing something doesn't mean people have read it in full. :) I know I
sometimes start reading an article, "get where it's going" and pass it on.

More often than not, sharing long article is a form of self-praise (for me). I
feel very pleased with myself sharing a piece from Aeon on Facebook, amidst
cats and babies and other stuff: "Look at me, I'm deep and I'm making Facebook
a smarter place".

So, it makes total sense that long read gets more shares per view, but it
doesn't necessarily mean deeper "engagement".

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jresnicow
Very cool post! Thanks for sharing? How applicable do you think the learnings
are for businesses outside of HR/recruiting? Could the same be applied to
content marketing for other types SaaS?

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seanf80
I think many of the findings are applicable to any business.

I think article length always impacts virality but the sweet spot might change
based on the domain. You'd have to experiment, but we see consistently across
domains that articles less than 500 words perform poorly.

For SaaS, I think the best sharing channels are likely going to be LinkedIn
and Twitter. Consumer apps is probably Facebook and Twitter.

The other findings like positive language, posting on Tuesday's and people
loving lists are themes that other people have found in other domains.

Thanks for the question.

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AGr33nb3rg
Good read. Did any of the rankings search Twitter for dissemination of
articles? Or was that firehouse of information simply too large to track?

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seanf80
Great question.

I'd love to have Twitter data, but last year Twitter removed share counts from
their Tweet and follow buttons, so it's hard to get reliable information about
how many shares are happening for a given piece of content on Twitter.

However, I do think that if we had access to that information, Twitter would
have a similar share profile as LinkedIn, especially in the HR space. Based on
my experience, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most widely used channels for
people writing and working in that space.

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ramin138
Great Post! Thanks for publishing!

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emanuelpleitez
Great insights!

