I think many of the findings are applicable to any business.
I think article length always impacts virality but the sweet spot might change based on the domain. You'd have to experiment, but we see consistently across domains that articles less than 500 words perform poorly.
For SaaS, I think the best sharing channels are likely going to be LinkedIn and Twitter. Consumer apps is probably Facebook and Twitter.
The other findings like positive language, posting on Tuesday's and people loving lists are themes that other people have found in other domains.
Both the number of shares per article length graph and the shares per day of the week are averages, not the absolute values. I'll be sure to clarify that in the post.
I'd love to have Twitter data, but last year Twitter removed share counts from their Tweet and follow buttons, so it's hard to get reliable information about how many shares are happening for a given piece of content on Twitter.
However, I do think that if we had access to that information, Twitter would have a similar share profile as LinkedIn, especially in the HR space. Based on my experience, LinkedIn and Twitter are the most widely used channels for people writing and working in that space.
There's some different schools of thought on this.
A lot of content marketers and SEO experts recommend lots of articles targeting long tail keywords. However, the newer thought process is to write longer more in-depth articles and spend equal time promoting those articles.
Hey Sean. This is pretty interesting. My only concern would be that longer articles could be more difficult to "digest" for the reader and therefore less engaging. I would expect a viral professional article to need to be long and a viral casual article to need to be shorter. Is that something you have ever researched ?
Sharing something doesn't mean people have read it in full. :) I know I sometimes start reading an article, "get where it's going" and pass it on.
More often than not, sharing long article is a form of self-praise (for me). I feel very pleased with myself sharing a piece from Aeon on Facebook, amidst cats and babies and other stuff: "Look at me, I'm deep and I'm making Facebook a smarter place".
So, it makes total sense that long read gets more shares per view, but it doesn't necessarily mean deeper "engagement".
I have not researched that specifically, but the team at BuzzSumo analyzed 120 million articles and found a similar result. They found the optimal length for an article on Facebook to be 2000-2500 words and on LinkedIn to be 3500-4000.
So what you suggest could be true, the length of an article that does well on Facebook is shorter than LinkedIn and I'd argue that an article on Facebook is likely for a more casual reader than on LinkedIn.
However, even 2000 words is a fairly long article. They also found that articles under 500 words perform the worst.
I think article length always impacts virality but the sweet spot might change based on the domain. You'd have to experiment, but we see consistently across domains that articles less than 500 words perform poorly.
For SaaS, I think the best sharing channels are likely going to be LinkedIn and Twitter. Consumer apps is probably Facebook and Twitter.
The other findings like positive language, posting on Tuesday's and people loving lists are themes that other people have found in other domains.
Thanks for the question.