Yesterday, in the first part of the blog post, we talked about general statistics, summarizing the data for the big social networks. Today, we will focus on the particularities and abnormalities. More specifically, we will look at which domains are especially successful, how are the networks different from each other and what type of content works well, not just once but regularly?
The first analysis looks at domains with high social-signal numbers for many different URLs (and thereby different pieces of content). I evaluated those URLs that have at least a few interactions in each of the five networks. I also excluded the homepages and only looked at sub-pages, while actually keeping an eye for the standard deviation. Here are the top 20:
| Domain | Ø Signals per Artikel |
|---|---|
| youtube.com | 608.426 |
| tickld.com | 482.404 |
| godvine.com | 346.947 |
| upworthy.com | 188.094 |
| skinnytaste.com | 155.664 |
| collegehumor.com | 95.502 |
| iflscience.com | 95.226 |
| buzzfeed.com | 91.360 |
| mic.com | 85.979 |
| theoatmeal.com | 85.947 |
| dailykos.com | 80.321 |
| thedodo.com | 79.719 |
| dangerousminds.net | 50.908 |
| huffingtonpost.com | 48.050 |
| marthastewart.com | 47.609 |
| huffingtonpost.ca | 46.156 |
| apple.com | 38.576 |
| today.com | 37.718 |
| gawker.com | 37.495 |
| vox.com | 36.916 |
YouTube is leading the pack by quite the margin. Aside from that, there are two abnormalities: for one, only English language content appears in the top 20. It seems that the ability to continuously create content which generates high interaction numbers on many networks is something where other countries are not yet advanced enough to get into the top spots. The other peculiarity that catches the eye is that there are no “offline world” players on the list. It looks like classic publishers have not yet adopted this knowledge.
While we can refer to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as “general-interest networks”, which are directed at the entire population, we get a somewhat different picture for LinkedIn and Pinterest. Due to this, I next looked at domains which are clearly more successful in both of these networks. The percentage behind each domain shows how many percent of the social-signals from each network come from sub-pages on the domain:
| sincerelyjules.com (100%) | oecdbetterlifeindex.org (90%) |
| indulgy.com (100%) | pharmatimes.com (88%) |
| short-haircut.com (100%) | deloitte.com (71%) |
| weddingbee.com (98%) | capgemini.com (70%) |
| makeit-loveit.com (95%) | accountingweb.co.uk (63%) |
| marthastewartweddings.com (95%) | itworld.com (63%) |
| burdastyle.com (94%) | technet.com (62%) |
| skinnytaste.com (93%) | gartner.com (61%) |
| remodelista.com (88%) | mckinsey.com (56%) |
| 101cookbooks.com (86%) | ogj.com (54%) |
| keeperofthehome.org (86%) | ifttt.com (52%) |
| alldayidreamaboutfood.com (85%) | finextra.com(52%) |
| weheartit.com (82%) | strategy-business.com (50%) |
| momswhothink.com (81%) | informationweek.com (48%) |
| allrecipes.com (76%) | emarketer.com (48%) |
Both Pinterest and LinkedIn prove all their prejudice to hold true. While Pinterest is mainly about fashion, furniture, weddings and food, we get a large number of consultants and IT nerds on pages with a high share of LinkedIn interactions. These two networks can therefore be very valuable for websites with the corresponding target-audiences and will often outperform Facebook.
Finally, I want to show you a few examples of successful content types that show up in the list of URLs with the most social signals, over and over again:
- Videos – Moving content will regularly show up on the top lists. Whether they are a musicvideo on YouTube with more than 10 million shares, skillful self-promotion from Dubai or the, by now, well-known RedBull stunt – Users love these videos and like to share and comment on them.
- Quizzes – Regardless of how silly the questions may be, quizzes attract users. Who doesn’t want to know which country best fits their personality or fill out general personality tests? Advertisers are happy about the detailed user-profiles and skilfully use social networks for their distribution.
- Top Lists – A long runner that still works. As soon as there is a number at the beginning of an article headline, users will click on it: 10 Reasons Against Cellphones for Children, 10 Good Mood Quotes or Pictures from the 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores – Just make sure they are not too hard to read.
This is it for now with our Toolbox analysis on the basis of 100 billion social signals. By the way: the Social-Media module is included in every Toolbox account for free, and contains features such as Content Discovery, which are not only useful to SEOs.
