Page 59 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
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10. Revive content.
One of the most depressing aspects of content creation is its short shelf life. I
actually had one person tweet to me “Great post—even though it’s older
content.” The post was only two weeks old!
Research demonstrates that social sharing on a post is usually over by the
fourth day. In fact, after three days, the number of social shares drops by at least
96 percent across every major social network. But the demise of your content is
not inevitable.
Here’s an example of content that breaks the “death cycle.” A few months
ago I noticed something startling in my statistics. Over the life of my Twitter
account, a total of 100,000 people had unfollowed me! As I dug into it, I
discovered there was a sub-culture of people who do mass Twitter following and
then mass unfollowing. Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit. All that
unfollowing had nothing to do with me after all! It was a residual effect of
people trying to “game” Twitter!
I thought this would make a provocative blog post14 and I had some fun with
the headline: “Why 100,000 People Unfollowed Me on Twitter.” But it was also
a very helpful post that answered a lot of questions people had about this strange
behavior.
Here are the total social sharing statistics (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and
Google+) for the post:
Month of Publication Total Number of Shares
April 2013 378
September 2013 654
December 2013 1,012
March 2014 1,144
September 2014 1,858
January 2015 2,020
How is this possible? If most blog posts die after four days, how did this
content keep chugging and chugging, finding new fans for years?
There’s a lot of sharing potential stored in content that is always relevant and
useful. This evergreen content answers your customers’ most common questions
and rarely goes out-of-date. For example, a “Mommy Jogger” blog would
feature evergreen content that describes the correct use of jogging strollers. This
post would be useful and relevant to customers for years … and could also be re-
