Share Links Insight

8/18/2019 Share Links Insight

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This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of

over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to

understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the for-

mats that get relatively more shares or links.

What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is sim-

ply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is

simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at

amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting

their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it.

On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that peo-

ple love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets farmore shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share

content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to work

much harder to acquire links. Our research uncovered:

• The sweet spot content that achieves both shares and links

• The content that achieves higher than average referring domain links

Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from

Analyzing 1 Million Articles

Moz


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• The impact of content formats and content length on shares and links

Our summary findings are as follows:

1. The majority of posts receive few shares and even fewer links. In arandomly selected sample of 100,000 posts over 50% had 2 or less

Facebook interactions (shares, likes or comments) and over 75% had

zero external links. This suggests there is a lot of very poor content out

there and also that people are very poor at amplifying their content.

2. When we looked at a bigger sample of 750,000 well shared posts we

found over 50% of these posts still had zero external links. Thus

suggests while many posts acquire shares, and in some cases large

numbers of shares, they find it far harder to acquire links.

3. Shares and links are not normally distributed around an average.

There are high performing outlier posts that get a lot of shares and

links but most content is grouped at the low end, with close to zero

shares and links. For example, over 75% of articles from our random

sample of 100,000 posts had zero external links and just 1 or less

referring domain link.

4. Across our total sample of 1m posts there was NO overall correlation

of shares and links, implying people share and link for different

reasons. The correlation of total shares and referring domain links

across 750,000 articles was just 0.021.

5. There are, however, specific content types that do have a strong

positive correlation of shares and links. This includes research backed

content and opinion forming journalism. We found these content

formats achieve both higher shares and significantly more links.

6. 85% of content published (excluding videos and quizzes) is less than

1,000 words long. However, long form content of over 1,000 words

consistently receives more shares and links than shorter form content.

Either people ignore the data or it is simply too hard for them to write

quality long form content.

7. Content formats matter. Formats such as entertainment videos and

quizzes are far more likely to be shared than linked to. Some quizzes

and videos get hundreds of thousands of shares but no links.


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8. List posts and videos achieve much higher shares on average than

other content formats. However, in terms of achieving links, list posts

and why posts achieve a higher number of referring domain links than

other content formats on average. While we may love to hate them, list

posts remain a powerful content format.

We have outlined the findings in more detail below. You can download the full

30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:

The majority of posts receive few shares and even

fewer links

We pulled an initial sample of 757,000 posts from the BuzzSumo database.

100,000 of these posts were pulled at random and acted as a control group. As

we wanted to investigate certain content formats, the other 657,000 were well

shared videos, ‘how to’ posts, list posts, quizzes, infographics, why posts and

videos. The overall sample therefore had a specific bias to well shared posts and

specific content formats. However, despite this bias towards well shared arti-

cles, 50% of our 757,000 articles still had 11 or less Twitter shares and 50% of

the posts had zero external links.

By comparison 50% of the 100,000 randomly selected posts had 2 or less Twit-

ter shares, 2 or less Facebook interactions, 1 or less Google+ shares and zero

LinkedIn shares. 75% of the posts had zero external links and 1 or less referring

domain links.

75% of randomly selected articles had zero external links

Shares and links are not normally distributedShares and links are not distributed normally around an average. Some posts go

viral and get a very high numbers of shares and links. This distorts the average,

the vast majority of posts receive very few shares or links and sit at the bottom

of a very skewed distribution curve as shown below.


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This chart is cut off on the right at 1,000 shares, in fact the long thin tail would

extend a very long way as a number of articles received over 1m shares and one

received 5.7m shares.

This long tail distribution is the same for shares and links across all the domains

we analyzed. The skewed nature of the distribution means that averages can be

misleading due to the long tail of highly shared or linked content. In the exam-

ple below we show the distribution of shares for a domain. In this example the

average is the blue line but 50% of all posts lie to the left of the red line, the

median.


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Content sample Average total shares Median shares Average referring domain

links Median referring domain links Correlation total shares - referring domains

Full sample

of posts

(757,317) 4,393 202 3.77 1 0.021 Posts with over

10,000 total shares

(69,114) 35,080 18,098 7.06 2 0.101

The increased correlation is relatively small, however, it does indicate that very

popular sites, other things being equal, would have slightly higher correlations

of shares and links.

Our finding that there is no overall correlation contradicts previous studies that

have suggested there is a positive correlation of shares and links. We believe the

previous findings may have been due to inadequate sampling as we will discuss

below.

The content sweet spot: content with a positive

correlation of shares and links

Our research found there are specific content types that have a high correlation

of shares and links. This content attracts both shares and links, and as shares

increase so do referring domain links. Thus whilst content is generally shared

and linked to for different reasons, there appears to be an overlap where some

content meets the criteria for both sharing and linking.


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The content that falls into this overlap area, our sweet spot, includes content

from popular domains such as major publishers. In our sample the content also

included authoritative, research backed content, opinion forming journalism and

major news sites.

In our sample of 757,000 well shared posts the following were examples of

domains that had a high correlation of shares and links.

Site Number of articles in sample Referring domain links - total shares correla-

tion The Breast Cancer Site 17 0.90 New York Review of books 11 0.95 Pew

Research 25 0.86 The Economist 129 0.73

We were very cautious about drawing conclusions from this data as the indivi-dual sample sizes were very small. We therefore undertook a second, separate

sampling exercise for domains with high correlations. This analysis is outlined

in the next section below.

Our belief is that previous studies may have sampled content disproportionately

from popular sites within the area of overlap. This would explain a positive

correlation of shares and links. However, the data shows that the domains in the

area of overlap are actually outliers when it comes to shares and links.

Sweet-spot content: opinion-forming journalism

and research-backed content

In order to explore further the nature of content on sites with high correlations

we looked at a further 250,000 random articles from those domains.

For example, we looked at 49,952 articles from the New York Times and 46,128

from the Guardian. These larger samples had a lower correlation of links and

shares, as we would expect due to the samples having a lower level of shares

overall. The figures were as follows:

Domain


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Number articles in sample

Average Total Shares

Average Referring Domain Links

Correlation of Total Shares to Domain Links

Nytimes.com

49,952

918

3.26

0.381

Theguardian.com

46,128

797

10.18

0.287

We then subsetted various content types to see if particular types of content had

higher correlations. During this analysis we found that opinion content from

these sites, such as editorials and columnists, had significantly higher average

shares and links, and a higher correlation. For example:

Opinion content





Nytimes.com


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4,143

3,990

9.2

0.498

Theguardian.com

19,606

1,777

12.54

0.433

The higher shares and links may be because opinion content tends to be focused

on current trending areas of interest and because the authors take a particular

slant or viewpoint that can be controversial and engaging.

We decided to look in more detail at opinion forming journalism. For example,

we looked at over 20,000 articles from The Atlantic and New Republic. In both

cases we saw a high correlation of shares and links combined with a high num-

ber of referring domain links as shown below.

Domain





TheAtlantic.com

16,734

2,786


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18.82

0.586

NewRepublic.com

6,244

997

12.8

0.529

This data appears to support the hypothesis that authoritative, opinion shaping

journalism sits within the content sweet spot. It particularly attracts more refe-

rring domain links.

The other content type that had a high correlation of shares and links in our ori-

ginal sample was research backed content. We therefore sampled more data

from sites that publish a lot of well researched and evidenced content. We found

content on these sites had a significantly higher number of referring domain

links. The content also had a higher correlation of links and shares as shown

below.

Domain





FiveThirtyEight.com

1,977

1,783

18.5


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0.55

Priceonomics.com

541

1,797

11.49

0.629

PewResearch.com

892

751

25.7

0.4

Thus whilst overall there is no correlation of shares and links, there are specific

types of content that do have a high correlation of shares and links. This content

appears to sit close to the center of the overlap of shares and links, our content

sweet spot.

The higher correlation appears to be caused by the content achieving a higher

level of referring domain links. Shares are generally much easier to achieve than

referring domain links. You have to work much harder to get such links and it

appears that research backed content and authoritative opinion shaping journa-

lism is better at achieving referring domain links.

Want shares and links? Create deep research or opinion-forming

content

Our conclusion is that if you want to create content that achieves a high level of

both shares and links then you should concentrate on opinion forming, authori-

tative content on current topics or well researched and evidenced content. This

post falls very clearly into the latter category, so we will shall see if this proves

to be the case here.


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The impact of content format on shares and links

We specifically looked at the issue of content formats. Previous research had

suggested that some content formats may have a higher correlation of shares

and links. Below are the details of shares and links by content format from our

sample of 757,317 posts.

Content Type

Number in sample



Correlation of total shares & referring domain links

List post

99,935

10,734

6.19

0.092

Quiz

69,757

1,374

1.6

0.048

Why post

99,876

1,443


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5.66

0.125

How to post

99,937

1,782

4.41

0.025

Infographic

98,912

268

3.67

0.017

Video

99,520

8,572

4.13

0.091

What stands out is the high level of shares for list posts and videos.

By contrast the average level of shares for infographics is very low. Whilst thetop infographics did well (there were 343 infographics with more than 10,000

shares) the majority of infographics in our sample performed poorly. Over 50%

of infographics (53,000 in our sample) had zero external links and 25% had less

than 10 shares in total across all networks. This may reflect a recent trend to

turn everything into an infographic leading to many poor pieces of content.


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What also stands out is the relatively low number of referring domain links for

quizzes. People may love to share quizzes but they are less likely to link to them.

In terms of the correlation of total shares and referring domain links, Why posts

had the highest correlation than all other content types at 0.125. List posts and

videos also have a higher correlation than the overall sample correlation whichwas 0.021.

List posts appear to perform consistently well as a content format in terms of

both shares and links.

Some content types are more likely to be shared than linked to

Surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the

potential to go viral with high shares. However, this form of content is far lesslikely to achieve links.

Entertaining content such as Vine videos and quizzes often had zero links des-

pite very high levels of shares. Here are some examples.

Content

Total Shares

External Links

Referring Domain Links

Long form content consistently receives more shares and links

than shorter-form content

We removed videos and quizzes from our initial sample to analyze the impact of

content length. This gave us a sample of 489,128 text based articles which broke

down by content length as follows:

Length (words) No in sample Percent


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Over 85% of articles had less than 1,000 words.

We looked at the impact of content length on total shares and domain links.

Length (words) Total Shares Average Referring Domain Links Average


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the initial findings do indicate that shares and/or links can be increased when

some of these factors are combined.

You can download the full 30 page research report from the BuzzSumo site:

Steve will be discussing the findings at a Mozinar on September 22, at 10.30am

Pacific Time. You can register and save your place here https://atten-

dee.gotowebinar.com/register/41189941...

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