Almighty.Press has been in development for the last 2 years and in that time we have collected a considerable amount of data. To celebrate our launch we have conducted some deep analysis of the data we collected in our development phase. We wanted to understand what makes content go viral and share these valuable insights with our clients. We recently analyzed 50 million popular articles from the past 2 years and compiled a report of our findings.

What did we learn? Well first of all, sorting data sets for that many articles into a manageable report is an absolute nightmare, luckily our development team consists of some pretty sharp people so we managed to get it done. Everything else? We have listed the 7 most vital things to take away from this report into something a little easier to digest than 50 million rows of raw data. Hopefully our analysis will give you the edge when planning your content strategy.

First of all you need to write compelling, actionable content. That kind of goes without saying. But in addition to writing amazing content, including these 7 factors will increase the chances of more social media shares.

1. People prefer sharing long articles

There is an assumption that because more people are consuming content on mobile devices, that we should create short content that’s quick to digest. It’s easy to check this assumption by looking at the numbers. We looked at the top 20% of articles in our database and according to our research its actually the opposite.

The chart below shows that on average, long form content gets more social shares than short form content, with the best performing content being being articles with over 4000 words.

Content Length by Shares

What can we learn from this? It tells us that people are more inclined to share a long, thought provoking post about an intellectual topic. That’s not to say that short form content is dead, people will always like to share short, funny posts about seemingly random topics. But if you want to make a larger impact on social media, its often better to take the time to write one really awesome piece of content, rather than spend the same time churning out multiple pieces of mediocre quality.

2. Images in content get more Facebook Shares

Content with images will increase engagement. We took a loot at average Facebook shares for content that has one or more images and compared that to posts without any images.

Images vs No Images

Looking at the numbers you can see that over twice as many people shared a piece of content that had at least one image. This reinforces the importance of having captivating visual elements within the body of your text.

We also analyzed the results to see which sites took advantage of the Facebook custom image preview feature that allows the content owner to define the image used in Facebook News Feed’s by setting the image URL as a meta tag in the HTML of the page. We also wanted to see how it can significantly improve the average share count of the article.

The numbers show that articles using the custom Facebook meta tag got shared five times as much as articles with no custom images.

What does this tell us? Taking the time to create a custom Facebook preview image for your content will drastically improve your click through rate from Facebook and other social media platforms.

3. Emotions get shares

We looked at the top 20,000 articles and categorized them into emotions like sadness, amusement, laughter, anger, joy, ect.

Popular Emotions

The 3 most popular emotions were;

Awe — 25.3%

Laughter — 17.8%

Amusement — 15.4%

The least popular being sadness and anger.

A study by the New York Times determines the primary reasons people are motivated to share an article are:

Bring value

Grow relationships

Self-fulfillment

Define themselves

Causes they care about

People will also share things for selfish reasons, narcissism for example.

14 of the top 20 most shared articles were quizzes, but why do people share quizzes? Quizzes fuel our ego, they provide chances for other people to learn more about what we value and who we are. When somebody shares a quiz result, they do it thinking they will have some impact on how other people perceive them. They want people to think they are more intelligent, caring or compassionate than they might necessarily be in reality.

4. List and infographics get results

We wanted to know what types of content format performed better than others. So we grouped our data into six categories:

infographics

lists

video

how to articles

what posts

what posts

Content Type vs Shares

Infographics and list posts vastly outperform all other content types, there are many reasons for this. List posts come with an immediate overview of what the reader can expect “10 Things That Do Something…” Also the numeric formatting of the content makes it easier for the reader to glance over.

Its the same with infographics, they make it easy to consume a large amount of information in a relatively small space in a manner that is visually appealing to the reader.

5. Trust is important

People will share your content if they trust the source. We wanted to compare how articles performed with or without an author bio. We also wanted to segment this into individual social networks to see how that played a role.

Trust is a major factor for networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+

Bio vs No Bio

As you can see, trust plays an important role on Google+ and LinkedIn especially. This can be expected from networks that rely a lot on professional business connections. Trust does not seem to play any significant role when it comes to Facebook however, this is largely due to the type of content that is shared on Facebook, mostly for entertainment purposes and interaction with our closest friends.

LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter tend to share content that is more articulated, people put a lot more thought into what kind of content they share when it could be seen by their boss or employee’s.

6. Influencers = Exponential

Getting influencers to share your content can have a snowball effect on your share count. Some shares are far more valuable that others and we set out to find a way to quantify that value in a manner we could analyze.

First we needed to define what an influencer is. For our purposes an influencer was somebody who received an average retweet count of 5 or more on each of their tweets. We took this benchmark and then analyzed the top 50,000 posts on Twitter to find how influencers effect the reach of an article.

Influencers Sharing vs Average Share Count

As the chart shows, having influencers sharing your content can have a significant effect on the overall performance of your content.

7. Tuesdays are the best days to publish

When you choose to publish your content can also play a large role in how much reach it garners. In the chart below, we compared the the total numbers of shares against the day the article was published and the results speak for themselves.

Day vs Total Shares

Its clear to see that content is shared more through the week, with Monday and Tuesday getting the highest number of shares, however weekends tend to perform poorly in comparison to weekdays.

In summary

Take the time to create in-depth, well researched articles that feature visual stimulus for your readers and also educate them at the same time. Place yourself in a position of trust and play on the emotions of your readers, but don’t overdo it and certainly don’t bore them to death while they read your article.

The best way to find content that will resonate with your target audience is to use the Almighty.Press content discovery tools that will allow you to find content that is both fresh and engaging, giving you the critical advantage that’s needed in today’s content marketing world.