Over the last year or so, a con­sen­sus has been devel­op­ing around the rela­tion­ship between social media and SEO. Name­ly, that the more con­tent is shared via social, the more like­ly it is to gain links – and thus gain more vis­i­bil­i­ty in search as a result. Recent exten­sive research sug­gests how­ev­er that the pic­ture is much more com­plex. And sober­ing.

The major­i­ty of con­tent pub­lished on the Inter­net is sim­ply ignored when it comes to shares and links. Most peo­ple are wast­ing their time either pro­duc­ing poor con­tent or fail­ing to ampli­fy it.

These are just two of the rather bru­tal con­clu­sions from a recent­ly pub­lished joint sur­vey from SEO tool ven­dor Moz and con­tent mar­ket­ing SaaS spe­cial­ist Buz­zSumo.

The research looked at more than 1 mil­lion pieces of con­tent in order to “under­stand the cor­re­la­tion of shares and links, to under­stand the con­tent that gets both shares and links, and to iden­ti­fy the for­mats that get rel­a­tive­ly more shares or links.”

Content Marketing Links & Shares: 8 Key Findings

The full report is well worth read­ing, but here are some of the stand­out find­ings – not least because many of them con­tra­dict con­ven­tion­al wis­dom around social media, SEO, and con­tent mar­ket­ing.

1. The major­i­ty of posts receive few shares and even few­er links. In a ran­dom­ly select­ed sam­ple of 100,000 posts, more than 50 per­cent had 2 or less Face­book inter­ac­tions (shares, likes or com­ments) and more than 75 per­cent had zero exter­nal links.
2. It’s eas­i­er to acquire shares than links: Look­ing at a big­ger sam­ple of 750,000 well-shared posts, the research found that more than 50 per­cent of these posts still had zero exter­nal links. This sug­gests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cas­es large num­bers of shares, acquir­ing links is far hard­er.
3. Shares and links are not nor­mal­ly dis­trib­uted around an aver­age. There are high per­form­ing out­lier posts that get a lot of shares and links, but most con­tent is grouped at the low end, with close to zero shares and links. For exam­ple, more than 75 per­cent of arti­cles from the ran­dom sam­ple of 100,000 posts had zero exter­nal links and just 1 or less refer­ring domain link.
4. Peo­ple share and link for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Across the total sam­ple of 1 mil­lion posts there was no over­all cor­re­la­tion of shares and links.
5. Spe­cif­ic con­tent types do have a strong pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion of shares and links. These include research backed con­tent and opin­ion form­ing jour­nal­ism. These con­tent for­mats achieve both high­er shares and sig­nif­i­cant­ly more links.
6. Long form con­tent (more than 1,000 words) con­sis­tent­ly receives more shares and links than short­er form con­tent. Eighty-five per­cent of con­tent pub­lished (exclud­ing videos and quizzes) is less than 1,000 words long. How­ev­er,. Accord­ing to Moz/BuzzSumo, this means “either peo­ple ignore the data or it is sim­ply too hard for them to write qual­i­ty long form con­tent.”
7. Con­tent for­mats mat­ter. For­mats such as enter­tain­ment videos and quizzes are far more like­ly to be shared than linked to. Some quizzes and videos get hun­dreds of thou­sands of shares but no links.
8. List posts and videos achieve much high­er shares on aver­age than oth­er con­tent for­mats. How­ev­er, in terms of achiev­ing links, list posts and why posts achieve a high­er num­ber of refer­ring domain links than oth­er con­tent for­mats on aver­age. List posts remain a pow­er­ful con­tent for­mat.

The Future Of Content Marketing?

At first blush, it might be tempt­ing to con­clude that con­tent mar­ket­ing is a waste of time giv­en that the vast major­i­ty of con­tent seems to lan­guish unloved. On the oth­er hand, it high­lights some crit­i­cal fac­tors that would be fool­ish to ignore.

Shar­ing and link­ing are clear­ly done for dif­fer­ent rea­sons and almost cer­tain­ly by dif­fer­ent peo­ple with dif­fer­ing incen­tives and moti­va­tions.

Research-backed con­tent and opin­ion-led jour­nal­ism are the two types of con­tent that have a bet­ter chance of hit­ting the sweet spot of shar­ing and links (and in the lat­ter case, an indi­ca­tion that PR still has a key role to play).

If noth­ing else, the research clear­ly shows that con­tent qual­i­ty, con­tent length, and con­tent for­mat are all vital fac­tors in get­ting any kind of viable return on invest­ment.

It also means being explic­it­ly clear about the goals and objec­tives for the con­tent, what kind of audi­ence you’re tar­get­ing, and where con­sumers are in their deci­sion jour­ney.

Get­ting con­tent shared may help with reach but won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly lead to links, and as a result, high­er search vis­i­bil­i­ty. In crude terms, is the audi­ence in the aware­ness phase or con­sid­er­a­tion phase?

Con­verse­ly, earn­ing links is much hard­er than gain­ing social shares. Cre­at­ing few­er but length­i­er more detailed con­tent assets may be a bet­ter long term strat­e­gy than lots of short­er form con­tent.

Ulti­mate­ly, smart con­sumer mar­keters will invest in audi­ence research and deci­sion jour­ney map­ping first before run­ning off and cre­at­ing con­tent. With­out this kind of approach, the like­li­hood of con­tent mar­ket­ing fail­ure is only increased.

What do you see as crit­i­cal for future con­tent mar­ket­ing suc­cess?