The importance of evergreen content in a content blindness world
Think of the ways you get information today.
It’s likely you’re getting it in a few ways. Google and Facebook may be the most common sources. Some people call them the owners of an information duopoly. (I’ll save that for another post.)
It’s true that the majority of us, through social or search, got used to getting quick answers for these networks.
Source: Parse.ly
We have a need, we google it.
We have some free time, Facebook will present what we’re most likely going to read now.
The same for every other social network. Algorithmic feeds are now our default, although that brings some challenges to society.
In these networks live different content formats, with different lifespans.
From my experience with several of our publisher clients, news content has a short lifespan. On social, they even measure a link’s half-life. The concept relates to “the amount of time at which a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak”.
Today, we’re analyzing three GetSocial customers and their data. I’ve tried to bring mixed industries and examples, for the sake of diversity.
- Client A: Recipes website (US)
- Client B: Marketing Magazine (US)
- Client C: Broadcasting Network (Europe)
For the study, we used the most visited articles in the last year. We can see a significant difference between half-lives of these three websites.
See how prolonged in time the recipes’ half-life is (Client A). We’ll understand that this website’s content is like wine: it gets better with time. Traffic for these articles actually accrues over time, compounding social, referral and search traffic.
Now, take a lot at the broadcasting network (Client C). This is the issue with ‘breaking news’ kind of content. It’s ephemeral. What’s news today rarely stays as news in weeks ahead. To build up audiences, they must provide a high volume of content, every day.
In between, we see the magazine (Client B) which provides business-related news but also timeless articles. An example would be something like ‘5 questions to ask in a marketing job interview’ or similar. That’s something they’re ranking for but isn’t time framed.
Overall, this metric (half-life) has been decreasing, across networks.
This means that content is disappearing from feeds faster than ever before. As such, your content’s visibility and availability, for your audience, is also compressing.
Content challenge
This brings a big challenge to everyone producing content. A few days ago I came across this video, something named like ‘How much does it cost to do a blog post’. The author explained all the steps involving the process: research, drafting, copyrighting, design, illustration, etc.
Taking all that effort into something that will reach its peak, in a social network, is as little as 2 hours can be frustrating..
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