Our approach

We looked at ten industries and analysed 15,000 posts from each to see what we could learn about how content is shared and consumed. We reviewed content from over the last six months, in some cases going back over a full year to reach the 15k minimum sample size. The markets included in this research are as follows:

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We have shown the average shares in each industry in the chart below, excluding News media the sector’s average shares far exceeds all others in the sample.

While the average shares may be indicative of how ‘sharable’ content is in each market, this study is not intended to be a definitive comparison of shares between markets. We took a small sample of around 20 to 25 sites in each sector, for example fashion blogs rather than all fashion media. The aim of this research is to compare the differences in the approach to content between sectors, rather than overall volumes.

The Power Law: A small number of outperforming posts

There is a power law when it comes to content sharing and engagement that applies equally to all industries. High performing posts are the outliers. Only a small number of posts manage to ‘go viral’ and achieve huge numbers of shares and views. Thus rather than a normal bell curve distribution of shares we see a skewed distribution as follows:

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The example below shows the most shared posts on Moz since January 1st 2016. The third most shared post has half the number of shares as the top post.

There is a power law when it comes to content sharing and engagement that applies equally to all industries. High performing posts are the outliers. Only a small number of posts manage to ‘go viral’ and achieve huge numbers of shares and views. Thus rather than a normal bell curve distribution of shares we see a skewed distribution as follows:

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We see exactly the same drop off when we look at Cancer Research UK. It is worth being aware that these high performing posts can distort the average number of shares in all markets.

Key Takeaway: Researching your market is critical to successful content marketing

The Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content marketing is:

creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly-defined and understood target audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The key task for anyone publishing content is to understand what resonates with your ‘clearly-defined audience’ in order to attract and retain their interest. This research uncovers profound differences in how content works in different markets. These differences cover both the content formats and headlines that resonate with readers, and where and when they hang out and share content. While there are common approaches that work across all industries, the research highlights that understanding the differences is more important than general advice.

The lesson is clear: Content strategy should be based on research and experimentation to discover a formula that works for your specific community. We hope the findings of this research sparks ideas to try in your own marketing and provides some pointers for how you might conduct further research of your own. Let’s get started…

Social networks for content distribution

The online universe belongs to Facebook and Google — the rest of us are just living in it.

- Matt Rosoff, Business Insider

A recent study by Parse.ly revealed that Facebook accounts for 87% of all referrals from social networks. Our research confirms the dominance of Facebook, particularly in consumer markets. In sectors such as automotive and news, Facebook makes up a massive 97.6% and 92.3% share of shares respectively

While Facebook’s influence can still be strongly felt in B2B markets, it is far less dominant and is balanced by both Twitter and LinkedIn. The only market we see Pinterest making any impact is Fashion where it is the second most important network. Google+ may or may not have an effect on search rankings. What we do know is that it has little relevance as a content distribution in any market.

Length of content

The general rule is that longer, more comprehensive content is usually more successful at achieving higher levels of shares and inbound links than short articles. The research highlights that in practical sectors such as financial advice, marketing and IT long form content is particularly successful.

However long articles do not work the best in all markets. Markets such as fashion, charity and automotive appear to have less reliance on words in favour of compelling images or videos. A previous study also found that in in legal and accountancy shorter form content received more shares than longer content. Then again would you want to read long form content written by a lawyer or an accountant?

Content types

Infographics are good for sharing, right? Not exactly. The content types that gets shared the most varies considerably from market to market. We looked at the different types of content - ‘how to’ articles, infographics, videos etc. - and how their consumption varies from the industry average.

Across all markets the most consistently performing content types are list features and practical ‘how tos’ which outperforms the industry averages in nearly all cases. Video is a format that works particularly well in news media, but seems to significantly under perform in industries such as pharmaceutical and IT, suggesting that video is not the best way to impart information in these markets. Infographics perform strongly to a marketing audience, but are below average in sharability for the charity sector and other markets.

Headlines: Power words and phrases

Headlines remain a critically important part of any content strategy. Competing for attention on busy homepages, google results and twitter feeds, headlines are usually your first and only touchpoint with potential customers. No wonder then that businesses such as the Washington Post and BuzzFeed are continually testing headlines to understand what works with their audiences. In every industry there are particular phrases, brand names and celebrities that have a powerful effect on content consumption, driving shares far ahead of industry averages. These phrases vary considerably between the sectors are part of the ‘secret sauce’ of engaging a market. Here are some of the words and phrases that stood out in our research:

Marketing sites’ most popular trigrams (group of consecutively written words) in the headlines reveal a practical focus designed to help the user. The most used phrases were ‘how to use’ , ‘need to know’, ‘how to create’, ‘to improve your’ and ‘ways to use’.

Travel sites’ most dominant headline phrases were ‘photo of’ (again indicating a visual rather than word-heavy focus) and ‘things to do’. Phrases such as ‘best places to’, ‘where to eat’ and ‘this week’ also performed well but these were used significantly less than the top two phrases.

Automotive sites have few common headline phrases, the most popoular trigrams are model names. In our 15,000 post sample ‘Aston Martin’ was used in headlines 241 times, ‘Telsa’ 189 times and ‘Porsche 911’ 180 times. Phrases such as ‘the new’, 185 times, and ‘the best’, 127 times, were also well represented.

Financial advice has few common phrases. ‘How to’ was the most used and most shared but this was only in 65 headlines across over 10,000 articles. ‘Discount codes’ and ‘voucher codes’ were used about 100 times. ‘Small businesses’ was used 47 times.

News sites are dominated by political content with the top headlines focused on politicians. ‘Donald Trump’ was used 401 times in our 15,000 sample, ‘Hilary Clinton’ 211, ‘Bernie Sanders’ 208. The UK European referendum was the main political event mentioned amongst the most shared content with 414 mentions plus a further 136 mentions of European referendum.

Charity websites have no common headline words or formats. We found very few recurring phrases, the few there were focused on charity fundraising events e.g. ‘race for life’. The most shared content had a tendency to include the charity name in the title such as ‘Cancer Research UK’, ‘British Red Cross’, ‘Ormond Street Hospital’ and ‘Help for Heroes’.

Pharmaceutical sites have few common phrases used in headlines, the most popular include ‘launch of’, ‘FDA expands’ and ‘the treatment of’.

Consumer electronics websites’ top perfoming content shows that gadgets are king. Brand names of the latest personal tech products appear most often, ‘Galaxy S7’ and ‘iPhone 7’ were the dominant ones in this time period. Other common headline phrases were ‘need to know’ and ‘is coming to’ but both were far below product names.

Information Technology websites’ top content also use product names in the headlines of top performing content: ‘AMD’, ‘Windows 10’ and ‘internet of things’ all performed strongly in the period, and ‘review’ articles averaged over 1,000 shares. As with consumer electronics ‘need to know’ was one of the most common phrases but only used 59 times in our sample.

Fashion websites prove that when it comes to fashion New York is the place to be. ‘New York’ appeared in 478 of the 10,000 most shared headlines from our selection of fashion blogs and sites. Words in the most shared articles include ‘ideas’, ‘pictures’, ‘outfits’, ‘celebrity’ and ‘Instagram’.

Best day of the week to publish

Across all markets, both business and consumer, content published during the week performs significantly better than at weekends. The Tuesday to Thursday period is typically the best, with Tuesday receiving the highest shares overall.

The weekend winners are news and financial advice but even their readership is well below their mid-week averages. Based on this research you could argue against ever publishing content on a weekend, however there is a lot less competition, particularly in B2B markets, so it can be worth trying.

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