I did a post a few weeks ago on the Real-Time Marketing Formula. In this formula there were factors regarding if the event could connect to your company and then the time. However, the biggest component on the time issue that its didn’t clue into me to expand on (until now) is the relevancy in how your traffic will decay with the content you are posting. Every marketer would enjoy having their content live forever, having huge spikes or steadily increases in traffic from each piece of content that they produce. Yet in reality taking a look at your traffic numbers, you can see that from the time you posted a piece of content there is a dip or decay in the traffic numbers as the post ages.
There are strategies surrounding content promotion and building your content in regards its potential traffic output; however, there really isn’t specific details on the decay that each individual piece of content you share will have. Plain and simple — It’s a significant factor in your promotion strategy.
What is Traffic Decay?
Traffic Decay is the decay from the date you posted the piece of content and the amount of traffic that steadily decreases from the minute you publish the post. The best way for me to think about it is in the actual scientific terms is the radioactive decay or carbon dating they use to determine the age of a fossil depending on the number of carbon atoms are left in a fossil. (If you are an expert on this, please excuse my layman’s brief description!)
Although, it would be a marketer’s dream to have their content constantly receive spikes in traffic and to grow exactly the same way every day — it will remain, but a distant dream. The content you produce and the traffic it gets will decay over time.
The factors that go into traffic are word of mouth, SEO, social media, your audience and the time of day. And one thing that should be at the top of your mind with the traffic to your content should be that the promotion of your content is also a direct reflection of the traffic as well too.
How much will the traffic decay in Facebook and Twitter posts?
Facebook Posts
Facebook stated that on average have around 1,500 News Feed stories on the site each time a Facebook user logs, there is always going to be a battle with what posts end up at the top of a user’s News Feed. However, to resolve some of the conflict, Facebook is now testing a new algorithm that is working to pull stories that have ended up lower on your feed that you would like to have seen up to the top.
Regardless of the tweaks that Facebook is implementing with posts on News Feed, there will always be an apparent decay on your Facebook post and then the possible link back to your site or content. On average the life of a Facebook post from your page will last about 3 hours; however, depending on your fans, their engagement with your page etc, that all has an effect of the rank of your post on their newsfeed. Nevertheless, using 3 hours is a safe bet in determining the life of the Facebook post.
In that 3 hour life span, that post will probably house a link to the content you are sharing on your page helping to determine the traffic that is flowing into the site that is hosting that piece of content and depending on the number of clicks you normally get, the traffic from that Facebook post will have a half-life and the traffic from that post will decay faster.
The Solution
To ease some of the decay, the folks at Buffer suggested to increase engagement with Facebook posts by posting the link to the piece of content twice. First as just the link and second with the corresponding image. One of the TrackMaven posts that we posted twice, following the advice above, jumped over 65% in engagement helping to decrease the decay of the traffic.
Tweets
Twitter was first intended as a blogging platform for short and quick updates. I think its safe to say that it’s shifted to a conversation platform with over 170 billion tweets sent out in total. So the decay with a tweet linking to your content actually degrades much faster than a Facebook post. Taking into account your audience, your average follower’s following a count, the number of times you tweet a day, and your peak times are the factors that really determine how long one of your tweets will last and the decay rate of traffic. All of these culminate into the difficulty to pinpoint the exact shelf life of a tweet. However, from a study done by Moz the life of a tweet is significantly longer when RTs occur on it and users identified that it takes a tweet about 18 minutes to gain a potential RT. Or another way to look as this can be “linked,” literally, back to bit.ly who did a study on how long people will pay attention to a link you posted. They evaluated the persistence of the link and then calculated the half life, which is the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak. EX: Take a look at this link showing the a tweet that the Washington Post sent out after the Earthquake hit the east coast.
The Solution
Sending out 1,000 tweets a day is far from solving the problem, but knowing the times that your audience interacts the most with you and scheduling tweets to being the conversation can extend the life of your traffic to that piece of content. SocialBro is a great tool that looks at your Twitter audience, analyzes the peak times of day that your followers are active, and connects with Buffer to make sure your tweets are scheduled to go out at those times.
Some Exceptions:
Real-Time Marketing
We’ve seen it with Oreo’s “Dunk in the Dark,” the royal baby (although marketers had 9 months to prepare for that), and really any other marketing moment surrounding an event requiring marketers to act on their feet to produce relevant content in the moment. Real-Time marketing, if done right, can lead to a large spike in traffic. Although, those spikes do have those benefits, the decay in traffic dramatically increases as time moves forward from that event. Take a look again at the example of the Washington Post’s tweet about the Earthquake that hit the East Coast a couple of years ago.
Evergreen Content
Evergreen content is meant to remain on your site in the long-term, if not permanently, and the content is typically on topics that are unchanging in marketing. The traffic decay to this content will happen; however, optimizing, recycling and maintaing the piece will keep the traffic at a steady up-flow. 101 posts on beginner instructions work great as evergreen pieces that can then be promoted at any time because they remain relevant to anyone who is looking for the introduction. Moz did another great case study on this and the traffic to an evergreen piece of content and its traffic reacted in the opposite.
Halo Effect
After you’ve produced a highly successful piece of content, you’ll of course have a nice bump in traffic and if it’s successful enough the bump will create another effect onto your site as a whole. After significant increases in traffic from a specific piece of content like a blog post, your traffic could then have a halo effect in overall increased traffic. When we did the piece on the 8 Marketing Influencers Talk About Competitive Intelligence, it received a nice surge in traffic, consequently though it also positively increased our overall traffic to the site as a whole.
Quick suggestions to slow the decay:
1. Suggested posts on the bottom of a blog
2. “Throwback Thursdays” of content that was created a while ago with some refreshes.
3. Links in other blog posts from your blog inserted into other relevant posts.
4. More Evergreen Content
5. Repurposing the content into other types. EX: A successful blog post into a white paper or webinar.
6. Posting a regular stream of content
While all of these pieces of content have a decaying life in regards to your content, there are various ways to repurpose each to breathe life into each. Content should be recycled and reused into other purposes because it allows for content to develop over the long-term and could lead to unexpected spikes in traffic.