A new report reveals that when blogging for business, companies are producing more content with less impact. It also uncovers specific tactics marketers can use to combat content overload and outperform their competitors.
Over the last five years, the average number of blog posts published per brand per month increased by 800 percent. However, over the same time the average number of social shares per post (from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest) decreased by 89 percent.
Marketers are producing more blog posts, but losing the distribution power and reader interactions provided by social sharing.
Just over the past year, the length of blog posts has changed from an average of 639 words per post in September 2015 to an average of 718 words per post in September 2016.
Brands aren’t just producing more posts — they are producing longer posts.
Fighting content overload is an increasingly tough challenge for marketers. But creating a more shareable blog and staying ahead of your competitors is easier than you think.
What makes a blog post more shareable?
How to Build a Better Blog Than Your Competitors: 2017 Blogging Report provides a prescription of specific best practices to build the ultimate shareable blog. The report dives into the the components of over 65,000 blog posts from to analyze industry-wide trends in:
- Blogging output and impact;
- How to optimize your posting schedule, and;
- Best practices to increase blog shareability.
Download your free copy of the 2017 Blogging Report now!
Here’s a preview of the report findings.
Blogging for business? Follow these seven best practices:
- The most competitive day of the week to publish your blog post is on Wednesdays and the busiest time of day is 12 noon EST. Learn the best day of the week and best time of day to publish blog posts in order to get the most shares in the report.
- Blog posts with short paragraphs get shared more often. Blog posts with paragraphs that contain two sentences on average perform best, with an average of 151 social shares per post.
- The optimal blog title length is seven words, which averages 412 social shares per post. In terms on character count, the optimal number of non-space characters is 41.
- Using all caps in a blog title doesn’t work. In our analysis of pronoun usage in titles, we found that pronouns in all caps consistently rank low in terms of average social shares per blog post.
- Use quotes in blog titles. Three of the top five best performing pronouns have quotation marks associated with them. This finding is significant in that is suggests that use of second person in blog titles is most effective when quoting an individual. It is also consistent with our analysis of the best performing punctuation in titles, which ranks double and single quotes as the second and third in terms of average social shares per blog post.
- Include media content in your blog posts — but exercise moderation. Blog posts with 11 images perform best, with 200 average social shares per post. Blogs with eight videos perform best, with 506 average social shares per post.
- Punctuation density matters. For each punctuation mark in the body of a blog post, there are definite correlations between density and shareability. For example, blog posts with 160-180 sentences per exclamation mark perform best.