It's an inbound marketing no-brainer: the best way to get your prospects to find and learn about your company, its products, and its services is by publishing content. And the latest
data shared by eMarketer
only confirms it...
In their April 2011 report, " Content is the Fuel of the Social Web," AOL and Nielsen Online gathered data from over 10,000 social media messages to analyze how people share content online.
The results? We think their most noteworthy finding is that, of all shares, 60% were of links to published content . Additionally, 36% of shares were of embedded content. The third subset of shares? A measly 4%, which is made up of URLs for brands or corporate websites. This means that, whether people are sharing links to your content or embedding it into social networks directly, an overwhelming 96% of the sharing that happens online is of content , not websites.
The study also revealed some data about the methods by which people are sharing content online, and more granularly, with whom. Overall, while
email still leads the pack
as the top sharing vehicle for content with 93% of internet users using it, it's not ahead in the race by much. Social networks trail slightly behind at 89%, and sharing through blogs is a close third at 82%. In addition, this data helps us understand that people share differently with different groups of people. Understanding the specific sharing behaviors of different groups can help marketers pinpoint the best methods for reaching their prospects.
What This Means for Marketers
When it comes to online sharing, it's not enough for businesses to simply have a website; long gone are the days when a "web presence" just means having a website for your business to call home.
Smart inbound marketers understand the need to create and publish content in order to get found online. The even smarter ones are creating it on a regular basis and are planting their content seeds in social media so it gets shared and spreads to a much larger degree. That means even if you've gotten your website up and running, your next step needs to be to come up with a solid content strategy .
Social sharing can be extremely valuable and effective in getting found online. The bottom line is, even if you have the prettiest looking website in the world, without content, it will likely stay hidden in a black hole of the web.
Is your business taking advantage of the power of published content?
Photo Credit:
Carlos Maya
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Gerry P 7:32 PM on May 19, 2011
Great post! This new data is very helpful, however, what does it say about how B2B's share information? Or did I miss that as not being a function of this post? Thanks much.
Michelle Carvill 1:08 AM on May 20, 2011
Nice stats - thanks. And it totally makes sense. Would have been good to see a 'business' content segment and whether there's any difference in how that is being shared.But great fuel for my blogging training course.
Sandy Martin 2:01 AM on May 20, 2011
I just read the original press release put out by aol and it seems that 25% of content shared contains links. Of that, 60% is branded content. Did I misunderstand? This blog seems to suggest a larger number for link sharing.
Bobble Bardsley 6:02 AM on May 20, 2011
Agreed - I think it states one in four social media messages link to content and, of that, 60% link to external sites (not sure where the other 40% go... Facebook internal links, perhaps).
Similarly, 60% of content-sharing messages - not 60% of all messages - mention brand names. With one in four messages sharing content, that means brand names get a mention about 15% of the time overall, if my maths is correct.
Jody Gamracy 12:51 PM on May 20, 2011
Good info. How do you differentiate 'content' from information found on a brand website? Some brand websites contain useful information, is that not 'content'?
Pamela Seiple 1:03 PM on May 20, 2011
@Jody: Basically, links to specific pieces of content within a website would count as published content. General URLs for websites (e.g. www.hubspot.com) would count as a brand website. So if someone linked directly to this blog article, although it's within the hubspot.com domain, it's still a specific piece of content. Make sense?
Jody Gamracy 1:20 PM on May 20, 2011
Thanks. Who is the genius who decided to replace the word 'information' with 'content'. Makes want to 'consume' some 'adult beverages' with other 'users' of said beverages ;)))
Vahe Habeshian 3:06 PM on May 20, 2011
Hi, the title to this post is misleading. According to the study, among all social-media messages that share content (and not all do--just 43% do), 60% contain URLs/links to published content. So... 60% of that 43% share URLs/links (or roughly 25% of all social-media messages, as Sandy Martin points out in one of the earlier comments). See here for more data from the study: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2011/4972/content-fuels-social-media-interaction
Richard Ng 5:24 AM on May 22, 2011
Great Post. Totally agreed that when come to IM, content is king!
Cheers!
LinkMasters4All 1:34 AM on May 23, 2011
Great Post! Thanks for sharing the information!
Christine 9:52 AM on May 23, 2011
I think social media was very great help in every site you been promoting because almost are visiting this site because it's very entertaining.
Brendan 1:42 PM on May 25, 2011
Content certainly is the driving force behind everything. Without great content, its impossible to maintain a strong social media presence. Great content is also the easiest way to succeed in your SEO campaign.