How to create viral content:10 Insights.

1) Long form content gets more social shares than short form content.

We've all heard stats on how more people are consuming content through their mobile devices. This means you should write short, bite-sized content to satisfy your readers's short attention spans, right?

We analyzed the top 10% most shared articles to see if this was the case.., the opposite is true.

On average, long-form content actually gets shared more than short-form content.

Which means there's a lot more opportunity for you to create great content and stand out from the pack. Less competition!

As a result, it’s easier to stand out.

Key Ingredient: Aim for at least 2,000 words per post. 

2. Image vs no image

We’ve all hear experts say compelling images increases engagement. But that only applies to social posts on Facebook, right? What about actual written content?

This time, we analyzed all the articles we’ve crawled at BuzzSumo to compare the average number of Facebook shares of content with:

1. 1 or more images
2. 0 images

Here's what we found:

This underscores the importance of having visual elements mixed in with bodies of text.

What about social meta tags for Facebook?

We were curious whether publishers that implemented these tags — specifically the preview image received more Facebook shares — on average. Again, we’d expected this to be true, but we wanted to see how dramatic this difference was.

4) Invoke awe, laughter, or amusement. Appeal to people’s narcissistic side

We analyzed the top 10,000 most shared articles across the web, and mapped each one to an emotion, like joy, sadness, anger, amusement, laughter, etc.

Here's the breakdown of emotions:

The most popular 3 emotions invoked were:

• Awe (25%)
• Laughter (17%)
• Amusement (15%).

Conversely, the least popular emotions were sadness and anger (which made up 7%).

Key Ingredients: Be entertaining... Nobody wants to bore their friends. 

5) People love to share lists and infographics

We were curious which content formats people were more likely to share. So we classified each article in our analysis into six types:

• Lists
• Infographics
• How-to articles
• "What" posts (e.g. articles whose title started with the word “What”)
• "Why" posts (e.g. articles that tried to answer a “Why” question)
• Videos

Here's what we discovered:

List posts and infographics receive more average shares than other content types.

More surprisingly, how-to posts and videos receive less shares than the average post.

There are many possible reasons why list posts get shared the most. Some possible reasons: Lists give the readers an exact idea on what to expect (i.e. 10 ways to do something), they’re also skim-friendly, and easy to read on the run.

Similarly, infographics make it easier to digest a huge amount of information in a visually appealing way.

Either way, make sure your content has plenty of images or charts, so readers aren’t intimidated by so much text.

Key ingredient: If you’re writing long-form content, remember to keep it easier to scan, and not a wall of text. Structuring it as a list post is a simple way to do that, but if you’re not writing a list, make sure you write easy to read paragraphs, and use sub-headlines and bullet points. 

6) 10 is the magic number for lists

Let's cut right to it: 10 item lists on average received the most social shares with 10,621 social shares.

In fact, lists of 10 had four times as many social shares on average than the second most popular list number (23). The other runner-ups are 16 and 24.

Key Ingredient: If you’re writing a list post, try to round it up or down to 10 items. 

7) People tend to share content that looks trustworthy

Does trust play a role with content sharing?

To answer, we compared the average number of social shares for two types of content:

1. No byline or bio attached to the content
2. Articles with a byline or bio

The results show the importance of a byline.

Byline, and implied trust, play a major role on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

However, trust doesn’t seem to make a difference in Facebook.

Articles with a byline or bio have 0.10% more social shares than those without a byline/bio. In contrast, in Google+, articles with a byline/bio have 42% more social shares than those without a byline or bio.

Byline trust not playing a major role on Facebook suggests users share different types of content in each social network. We usually sharing entertaining, funny content on Facebook with our close friends.

But on Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+, most of our followers are people we are associated with professionally. Since our “persona” matters more on these platforms, most people prefer to share content from a trustworthy source to build our credibility.

Key Ingredient: Remember to have a byline at the beginning of every post, and a bio at the end to make your content look trustworthy. 

8) Getting one extra influencer to share your article has a multiplier effect.

Not all sharers are created equal.

After all, if Harsh Agarwal ,Vinod Agarwal,Saurabh Bhatnagar shared your article with their followers, it'll generate more retweets/likes than if a random person shared it.

But can we quantify that effect?

It might seem impossible to convince Vinod Agarwal, Harsh Agarwal, Saurabh Bhatnagar to retweet your content (and trust us, we’ve tried. It’s pretty damn hard!) — but there's still a solution.

Here's what we found:

• One influential person sharing your content resulted in 31.8% more social shares
• Three influential people sharing your content doubled the number of social shares
• Five influential people sharing your content almost quadrupled the total number of social shares for an article

One way is to work backwards. Instead of writing your content first, find a piece of content that is similar to the one you want to produce, and see all the influencers that shared it. Then start building a relationship with those influencers before you launch your post.

9) Repromote your old content on a regular basis.

• Facebook: 98.9% decrease
• Twitter: 97.4% decrease
• LinkedIn: 97.34% decrease
• Google+: 96.7% decrease
• Pinterest: 96.7% decrease

After the first week, the number of shares for the next three weeks drops at least 86%. Twitter shares drop the most, and Linkedin shares drop the least.

• Twitter: 92.1% decrease
• Google+: 90% decrease
• Facebook: 89% decrease
• Pinterest: 86% decrease
• LinkedIn: 82% decrease

This is inevitable, right?

Key Ingredient: Don’t let your content be a 1-hit wonder! Repromote your old posts at least a week after it’s been published. Alternatively, find old content that ties into an upcoming event/holiday, and repromote that the day of the event. 

10) The best day overall to publish content for social shares is Tuesday

The day of the week you publish your content can have a big effect on how much it's shared. Take a look at the chart below, which shows the number total shares by day of week for all content we analyzed:

• Best Day Overall: Tuesday
• Best Day For Facebook: Tuesday
• Best Day for Google+: Tuesday
• Best Day for Twitter: Tuesday
• Best Day for Linkedin: Monday
• Best Day for Pinterest: Monday

Key Ingredient: Publish and share your content on Monday or Tuesday to get more shares. 

Conclusion

To summarize, here are the 10 data-driven insights you should be aware of when creating highly shareable content:

1. Long-form content has less competition — and gets more shares on average
2. Use images on Facebook
3. Use images on Twitter
4. Inspire awe, laughter, or amusement
5. List posts and infographics are more likely to be shared. If you’re writing a long form article, make sure it’s easy to skim
6. 10 is the magic number of lists (see what we’re doing here?)
7. Make sure your article inspires trust
8. Reach out to influencers before you write your content... and after to get it shared
9. Write evergreen content and promote your articles regularly after it’s been published.
10. Tuesday is the best day to publish and promote content