What Type of Content Marketing Gets the Most Social Shares

• Updated on: 2020-07-08
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What Type of Content Marketing Gets the Most Social Shares?

With organic social content from brands reaching new lows in reach and effectiveness, content marketers must look elsewhere for mechanisms to drive views and downloads.

Social sharing is key here, as recommendations from real people are more trustworthy than recommendations from brands, in most cases and circumstances.

Thus, if a reader/viewer/listener likes the content enough to recommend it to their friends/followers in social media, the producer of that content has a heightened opportunity for exposure, often to a net-new audience.

But what type of content is most likely to trigger that sharing behavior, and how does it vary by industry and social network?

New content marketing research from ClearVoice answers those questions (and more).

ClearVoice is software company with a nifty content marketing management platform and network of content creators. They are a Convince & Convert partner.

In their study, ClearVoice analyzed more than 640,000 articles/blog posts/infographics/etc across 14 specific industries (fashion, business, arts, etc).

The type of content marketing that works best in each industry varies considerably. Much more than I thought. For example, infographics are the most effective content format in more than one-third of the industries. 

Also, long-form content succeeds in tech, home and garden, beauty, and travel. But How-To content is a better bet for arts, and for hospitality.

Of course, you can’t only make listicles or infographics or how-tos. Your content editorial calendar must have variety. But these findings opened my eyes, and you’ll start to see more infographics on this site.

ClearVoice also looked at where content marketing consumers in each industry are most likely to share, and the results here were even more divergent.

In the business category, 61% of trackable social shares occur on Linkedin. Facebook is second at 35.7%. (note that Twitter is not included because they unhooked social shares from their API last year)

In the careers category, 73% of shares are on Facebook, with 23% on Linkedin.

But in a category like beauty/health/wellness 76% of shares on are Pinterest, with Facebook at 23%, and Linkedin essentially zero.

For each category, ClearVoice supplies a handy graphic that shows the top sharing tools, the best performing days of the week for social shares, and the top 5 category influencers (in terms of inducing social sharing). Helpful!

Knowing where your content marketing consumers are likely to share, as well as what they prefer to share can help you craft a better content marketing editorial calendar. And the comparison chart ClearVoice provides showing most effective days of the week (sorted by industry) is worth a download all by itself.

If you think content marketing is content marketing, regardless of what category you’re in, this new research definitely proves that notion to be false.

Get the ClearVoice Data Study: Content Trends Across 14 Industries.