Most marketers assume that if they build links on high-authority sites, the shares will come. In a whiteboard friday from last year, rand talks about this trend. Buzzsumo and moz analyzed 1 million articles and found that over 75 percent received no social shares at all. When they looked at all links – not just articles – this number rose to around 90 percent.
We (wrongfully) assumed this wouldn’t be the case with high-quality links we’ve earned. It turns out, even the majority of our links on sites with a high domain authority (da) didn’t get any social shares:
52 percent of links with a da over 89 received zero shares.
50 percent of links with a da over 79 received zero shares.
54 percent of links with a da over 59 received zero shares.
On average, our campaigns get 110 placements and 11,000 social shares, yet a single link accounts for about 63 percent of total shares. This means that if you exclude the top-performing link from every campaign, our average project would only get 4,100 social shares.
Since Most Links Don’t Yield Social Shares
Maining social traction in addition to a strategy for building a diverse link portfolio.
The social strategy can be as simple as targeting a few key websites that routinely yield high social shares. It’s also helpful to look at target sites’ social media accounts. When they post their own articles, what kind of engagement do they get?
Of all the sites that covered our campaigns, the following five Canadian Pharmaceutical Email List sites had the highest average social shares for our content. We know we could depend on these sites in the future for high social engagement.
Sites-with-social-shares.jpg
Exceptions to the rule
Some content can definitely accomplish both DW Leads high engagement and social shares. The buzzsumo and moz study found that the best types of content for attracting links and social shares are research-backed content or opinion pieces. Long-form content (more than 1,000 words) also tends to attract more links and shares than shorter content. At fractl, we’ve found the same factors – an emotional hook, a ranking or comparison, and a pop culture reference – tend to encourage both social sharing and linking.
