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9 Examples of Highly Shareable Content

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2 years ago

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9 Examples of Highly Shareable Content

Social media is a powerful tool for marketers.

Unlike most forms of customer outreach and branding, it creates an opportunity to initiate and maintain a conversation with your targets. 

This, in turn, lets you speak directly to them, address their needs, and explain why you offer the best solution.

But to get this started, you have to have the type of content that will first get their attention and then encourage interactions. 

And for maximum exposure, you want something they’ll share.

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This brand evangelizing lets you break out from your own circle of contacts and followers and tap into new groups to which you otherwise wouldn’t have been exposed. 

So, how do you create shareable content that others will want to repost?

That’s exactly what we’re going to look at in this guide. We’ll examine different types of shareable content, what makes content shareable, and give you examples of formats you can employ.

Ready to get started? Let’s go.

Creating Shareable Content

If you’re Beyoncé, you can probably skip this section.

For anyone else, who doesn’t have tens of thousands of adoring fans who will repost anything you share, let’s take a look at some of the common features you’ll find in highly-shared content:

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  • It’s useful – People share content they find helpful with their friends and family, so they can also get help.
  • It’s entertaining or amusing – Everyone loves to laugh. If you can make your target audience laugh, they’ll pass on that tickling item to others. 
  • It tells a compelling story – Since the first cavepeople gathered around a fire, humans have always loved discovering and sharing stories.
  • It takes a clear stance about your values – No one will retweet something that says, “Both sides raise valid points.” Don’t be afraid to take a stand if it aligns with your values. Others who agree will share it.
  • It has a visual component – While it can go viral with a text-only post, it’s a lot harder than something with a visual component. 
  • It’s timely – Latching on to trending cultural topics will generate a lot more exposure than a stale and outdated reference or meme. This includes “Keep Calm & (literally anything)”, jokes about Harambe, and any references to “all the feels.”
  • It’s original – If you’re just recycling content that’s readily available, it will be largely ignored. Look for unique angles and make something new. 

Now that we’ve discussed what makes content shareable, let’s dive into different types of content you can use to generate shares.

Types Of Sharable Content

1. Infographics

32.5% of marketers say they use infographics more than any other type of visual in their visual content marketing efforts.

Why? Because they provide information in an easily understood and digestible format. 

Image from author, December 2022green endorsement infographic

A versatile medium that can be employed for many different purposes, infographics are visual storytelling tools. Some of their more common uses include:

  • Timelines – Used to show planned steps, tell the history of an organization, or discuss future projections.
  • Statistical – Numbers make a powerful point. Creating infographics with statistics gives your viewers an easy way to understand and retain specific data.
  • Flowcharts – Breaking down components into steps, flowchart infographics can be a great way to simplify complex tasks.
  • Comparison – Infographics can be the perfect way to list various options’ pros and cons or differences in a head-to-head format.
  • Maps – Nothing conveys geographical information quicker than a map, which makes them perfect as infographics.                             

2. How-To Guides

Life is full of problems and hassles – and most people are incredibly grateful for any tips that can help them save time or energy. 

They appreciate learning a new or better way to do things and want to share this new knowledge with their social or business circles. 

That’s why how-to guides are incredibly shareable on social media. They can be videos, blog posts, or even infographics. Here’s an example:

Whether you’re trying to show existing customers the easiest way to use your product, help them envision a better quality of life, or navigate a mechanical process, step-by-step guides are the answer. 

And that makes them popular shares. 

3. Lists/Listicles

Not to get too meta on you, but this piece is a great example of our next type of shareable content.

Known as a listicle (a portmanteau of list and article), posts like this one are a reliable way to generate social traction. 

There are two main reasons for this:

  • They set expectations upfront – A headline of “5 Foods That Fight Belly Fat,” immediately tells you what the article is about and what readers will receive from reading it. 
  • They’re scannable – A study from 2008 found web users only read around 28% of the words on a page. Most people are skimming for the highlights and main points, which list posts make clear. 

You can also share images with graphic representations of lists. 

4. Videos

Whether it’s a first-person view of what a downhill skier sees or videos of people using your product, videos are an effective and share-friendly form of content. 

Extremely easy to consume, video engages, entertains, and informs the audience in a familiar format.

Now consider that Americans spend, on average, 6 hours and 23 minutes per day watching video content on their mobile devices. 

These run the gamut from music videos to influencer videos to sports clips. And they all have one thing in common (aside from being videos, obviously) – they generate a lot of shares.

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5. Memes

Since the advent of the internet age, memes have been a big part of online culture. Memes are shareable cultural “inside jokes,” and are usually funny and relatable. 

They’re also extremely popular with younger people. 55% of internet users between ages 13 and 35 share memes every week, while 30% share them every day.

That’s a lot of brand exposure if you can get them to share something from your social accounts. 

Just make sure your meme content is with the times.

Nothing gives off “How do you do, fellow kids” vibes like a meme format that hasn’t been used since 2015.

6. Current Events/Limited Time Promotions

Breaking news makes for highly shareable social content.

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Social media has become the dominant news platform, with 71% of Americans getting their news via Facebook, Twitter, and similar sites. 

But if you’re not in the news business – and most of you probably aren’t – it can be difficult to jump on these “hot” stories. And if you’re not in the news business, you probably don’t want to anyway.

So, what do you do?

The answer is to use limited-time offers. Create posts advertising a 30% off sale at your business, and your followers will share it with their friends who have similar needs for your product or services. 

Or use current events as a way to generate extra exposure. It can either be something related to your field or something completely random that you can link to your brand in a clever way. 

For example, who could ever forget Arby’s epic Twitter “beef” with Pharrell Williams? 

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brand mention example for TwitterScreenshot from Twitter, January 2014brand mention example for Twitter

And keep an eye on trending hashtags to see if there are any you can use to your advantage.

7. Heartwarming Stories

People love feel-good stories. And just as important, they like passing them on so others can feel good too.

Content that can inspire strong positive emotions tends to get passed around.

This can either be things like posts about charitable work your business just did or even content that encourages others to dream about something good, for example, “how to make your wedding day the best ever.”

8. Interactive Content

Thanks to advances in technology, people expect to be able to engage with content. That means they don’t want marketing to speak at them; they want something they can interact with.

From BuzzFeed quizzes to playable ads to polls, the internet age has led to an audience that wants to be part of the story, not just listen to it.

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Facebook engagement example pollScreenshot from Facebook, December 2022Facebook engagement example poll

Give your audience more than something to read; instead, give them experience. They’ll pass it along to their social media followers if it’s a good one. 

9. Controversial Opinions

It has been said that all publicity is good publicity.

With this in mind, if it suits your brand, don’t be afraid to rouse a little rabble. People love getting their blood up – it’s the principle talk radio was built around. 

And a study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that anything that evokes high-arousal emotions like anger or anxiety is often a conversation starter among audiences.

If it’s something that fits in with your brand’s image, a strategic attack on a popular stance can lead to a flood of shares, both from people who agree with your position, and those opposed to it.

In addition to the attention this type of content attracts, it also allows you to lead the conversation. Beware; it’s easy to cross the line from being controversial to being offensive. 

In general, if you’re going to use antagonism to your brand’s benefit, you need to do all the following:

  • Take a stance on a popular issue.
  • Explain why your stance is correct and the other is wrong.
  • Back up your argument with statistics and resources from reputable sources.
  • Stand by your convictions confidently.

You also need to understand that a misstep with this kind of content can have disastrous results, so use it with care. 

Optimize Your Sharable Content

There are countless types of content you can use to encourage social media shares, and as you can see, there can be some overlap between these types of content.

You could have a video that is also a how-to guide or an infographic that’s also a list. 

However, with planning and forethought (and a little luck), you can create the kind of social content that leads to more shares and improves your exposure.

And once you find something that’s working, don’t be afraid to use it more than once. 

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More resources: 

Featured Image: Merkushev Vasiliy/Shutterstock

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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1 week ago

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October 27, 2024

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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1 week ago

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October 27, 2024

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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October 25, 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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–

There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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