THE SCIENCE OF CONTENT

Analysing the DNA of top performing content

in different markets

Research by Technology for Marketing and BuzzSumo

THE SCIENCE OF CONTENT

Contents
03 Introduction
04 Our approach

05 The Power Law

07 Key Takeaway

08 Content analysis

08 Social networks for content distribution

10 Length of content
11 Content types

13 Headlines: Power words and phrases

15 Which day of the week is best to distribute conten

17 Market summaries

17 Automotive (car blogs)

18 Charity and Non profits

19 Consumer electronics
20 Fashion blogs

21 Financial advice
22 IT media

23 Marketing

24 News media

25 Pharmaceutical
26 Travel media

27 Appendix

Listing of all websites included in the analysis

29 About us

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Introduction
Banks filming SnapChat videos. Pharmaceutical brands with
Pinterest pages.
The problem with following the latest trends is that what works in other markets
may be entirely the wrong thing for your industry.
For all content producers the key challenge is creating something that resonates
strongly with your audience, and that thing can vary significantly from market to
market.
From previous studies we know that there are content types that perform well
across the board: list posts, helpful or emotional content, image based and long
form content.
However, there has been far less research into how content resonates within
particular audience niches. How does content consumption of fashion blogs differ
from the charity sector or IT? What are the real differences between business-tobusiness and consumer media?
Technology for Marketing (TFM) and BuzzSumo wanted to explore these
questions. We analysed 150,000 articles from 10 industries and asked the
following:
What types of articles and headlines resonate the most in different industries?
Which social networks are the preferred channel for content distribution?
What impact does the length of an article have on sharing?
What is the best day of the week to distribute content?
The full results will be presented at Technology for Marketing on Thursday
29th September 2016, Olympia London. Register for your free ticket here

Luke Bilton, Director,

Digital & Content, UBM
@lukebilton

Steve Rayson,
Director, BuzzSumo
@steverayson

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Our approach

We looked at ten industries and analysed 15,000 posts from each to see what
we could learn about how content is shared and consumed. We reviewed content
from over the last six months, in some cases going back over a full year to reach
the 15k minimum sample size.
The markets included in this research are as follows:

Sector

Ave shares per post

News
Automotive
Consumer electronics
Marketing
Fashion
Charity & NFP
IT
Travel
Financial advice
Pharma

17,747
2,246
790
527
490
455
188
123
18
34

We have shown the average shares in each industry in the chart below, excluding
News media the sectors average shares far exceeds all others in the sample.

While the average shares may be indicative of how sharable content is in each
market, this study is not intended to be a definitive comparison of shares between
markets. We took a small sample of around 20 to 25 sites in each sector, for
example fashion blogs rather than all fashion media. The aim of this research is to
compare the differences in the approach to content between sectors, rather than
overall volumes.

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The Power Law:

A small number of outperforming posts

There is a power law when it comes to content sharing and engagement that
applies equally to all industries.
High performing posts are the outliers. Only a small number of posts manage
to go viral and achieve huge numbers of shares and views. Thus rather than a
normal bell curve distribution of shares we see a skewed distribution as follows:

The example below shows the most shared posts on Moz since January 1st 2016.
The third most shared post has half the number of shares as the top post.

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There is a power law when it comes to content sharing and engagement that
applies equally to all industries.
High performing posts are the outliers. Only a small number of posts manage
to go viral and achieve huge numbers of shares and views. Thus rather than a
normal bell curve distribution of shares we see a skewed distribution as follows:

We see exactly the same drop off when we look at Cancer Research UK.

It is worth being aware that these high performing posts can distort the average
number of shares in all markets.

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Key Takeaway:

Researching your market is critical to

successful content marketing
The Content Marketing Institutes definition of content marketing is:

creating and distributing relevant and valuable content

to attract, acquire and engage a clearly-defined and
understood target audience with the objective of driving
profitable customer action.
The key task for anyone publishing content is to understand what resonates
with your clearly-defined audience in order to attract and retain their interest.
This research uncovers profound differences in how content works in different
markets.
These differences cover both the content formats and headlines that resonate
with readers, and where and when they hang out and share content. While there
are common approaches that work across all industries, the research highlights
that understanding the differences is more important than general advice.
The lesson is clear: Content strategy should be based on research and
experimentation to discover a formula that works for your specific community.
We hope the findings of this research sparks ideas to try in your own marketing
and provides some pointers for how you might conduct further research of your
own.
Lets get started

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Content Analysis

Social networks for

content distribution

The online universe belongs to Facebook and Google

the rest of us are just living in it. Matt Rosoff, Business
Insider
A recent study by Parse.ly revealed that Facebook accounts for 87% of all referrals
from social networks.
Our research confirms the dominance of Facebook, particularly in consumer
markets. In sectors such as automotive and news, Facebook makes up a massive
97.6% and 92.3% share of shares respectively.
While Facebooks influence can still be strongly felt in B2B markets, it is far less
dominant and is balanced by both Twitter and LinkedIn.
The only market we see Pinterest making any impact is Fashion where it is the
second most important network.
Google+ may or may not have an effect on search rankings. What we do know is
that it has little relevance as a content distribution in any market.

Social shares by network

Ranked by importance of Facebook

Automotive
News
Charity & NFP
Financial advice
Travel
Fashion

Consumer electronics

Pharma
Marketing

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Social shares by network

Ranked by importance of Facebook

Facebook Google+ Twitter

Automotive
News
Charity & NFP
Financial advice
Travel
Fashion
Consumer electronics
IT
Fashion
Marketing

Linkedin

Pinterest

97.6% 0.2% 1.6% 0.5% 0.1%

92.3% 0.2% 6.5% 0.9% 0.1%
87.5% 0.3% 8.3% 3.4% 0.4%
73.4% 1.1% 19.6% 5.7% 0.2%
70.8% 0.8% 13.6% 13.7% 1.0%
67.3% 0.5% 6.6% 0.6% 24.9%
60.3% 1.7% 33.7% 3.9% 0.4%
44.0%
2.1%
26.1%
27.5%
0.2%
34.1%
0.8%
21.7%
43.1%
0.2%
25.4%
3.0%
42.3%
27.8%
1.4%
Previous research by BuzzSumo revealed a similar picture: Facebook dominates
social sharing across business to consumer industries, while in business to
business content is equally likely to be shared on LinkedIn:

9.3
13.7
26.1

FACEBOOK
LINKEDIN
PINTEREST
TWITTER
GOOGLE +

9.8
85.6

25.7

Business to Business

Business to Consumer

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10

Length of content

The general rule is that longer, more comprehensive content is usually more
successful at achieving higher levels of shares and inbound links than short
articles.
The research highlights that in practical sectors such as financial advice,
marketing and IT long form content is particularly successful.
However long articles do not work the best in all markets. Markets such as
fashion, charity and automotive appear to have less reliance on words in
favour of compelling images or videos.

Length of the most shared

content in different markets

A previous study also found that in in legal and accountancy shorter form
content received more shares than longer content. Then again would you want to
read long form content written by a lawyer or an accountant?

(Number of words)

0-1000 1000-2000 2000-3000 3000-10000

Financial advice
Marketing
IT
Travel
News
Consumer electronics
Pharma
Fashion
Automotive
Charity & NFP

2%
8%
15%
14%
21%
24%
23%
24%
37%
18%

24%
21%
18%
24%
23%
25%
29%
33%
21%
42%

26%
34%
19%
22%
25%
24%
18%
26%
18%
35%

48%
38%
48%
40%
30%
28%
30%
17%
24%
4%

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11

Content types
Infographics are good for sharing, right?

Not exactly. The content types that gets shared the most varies considerably from
market to market. We looked at the different types of content - how to articles,
infographics, videos etc. - and how their consumption varies from the industry
average.
Across all markets the most consistently performing content types are list features
and practical how tos which outperforms the industry averages in nearly all
cases.
Video is a format that works particularly well in news media, but seems to
significantly under perform in industries such as pharmaceutical and IT,
suggesting that video is not the best way to impart information in these markets.
Infographics perform strongly to a marketing audience, but are below average in
sharability for the charity sector and other markets.

Automotive

Charity

Consumer Electronics

Fashion Blogs

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Financial Advice

IT

Marketing

News Media

Pharma

Travel Media

12

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13

Headlines:

Power words and phrases

Headlines remain a critically important part of any content strategy. Competing
for attention on busy homepages, google results and twitter feeds, headlines
are usually your first and only touchpoint with potential customers. No wonder
then that businesses such as the Washington Post and BuzzFeed are continually
testing headlines to understand what works with their audiences.
In every industry there are particular phrases, brand names and celebrities
that have a powerful effect on content consumption, driving shares far ahead of
industry averages. These phrases vary considerably between the sectors are part
of the secret sauce of engaging a market.
Here are some of the words and phrases that stood out in our research:
Marketing sites most popular trigrams (group of consecutively written words) in
the headlines reveal a practical focus designed to help the user.
The most used phrases were how to use , need to know, how to create, to
improve your and ways to use.
Travel sites most dominant headline phrases were photo of (again indicating
a visual rather than word-heavy focus) and things to do. Phrases such as best
places to, where to eat and this week also performed well but these were used
significantly less than the top two phrases.
Automotive sites have few common headline phrases, the most popoular
trigrams are model names. In our 15,000 post sample Aston Martin was
used in headlines 241 times, Telsa 189 times and Porsche 911 180 times.
Phrases such as the new, 185 times, and the best, 127 times, were also well
represented.
Financial advice has few common phrases. How to was the most used and
most shared but this was only in 65 headlines across over 10,000 articles.
Discount codes and voucher codes were used about 100 times. Small
businesses was used 47 times.
News sites are dominated by political content with the top headlines focused on
politicians. Donald Trump was used 401 times in our 15,000 sample, Hilary
Clinton 211, Bernie Sanders 208. The UK European referendum was the main
political event mentioned amongst the most shared content with 414 mentions
plus a further 136 mentions of European referendum.

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Top shared articles about Trump in the last 6 months:

Charity websites have no common headline words or formats. We found very few
recurring phrases, the few there were focused on charity fundraising events e.g.
race for life.
The most shared content had a tendency to include the charity name in the title
such as Cancer Research UK, British Red Cross, Ormond Street Hospital and
Help for Heroes.
Pharmaceutical sites have few common phrases used in headlines, the most
popular include launch of, FDA expands and the treatment of.
Consumer electronics websites top perfoming content shows that gadgets
are king. Brand names of the latest personal tech products appear most often,
Galaxy S7 and iPhone 7 were the dominant ones in this time period. Other
common headline phrases were need to know and is coming to but both were
far below product names.
Information Technology websites top content also use product names in
the headlines of top performing content: AMD, Windows 10 and internet of
things all performed strongly in the period, and review articles averaged over
1,000 shares. As with consumer electronics need to know was one of the most
common phrases but only used 59 times in our sample.
Fashion websites prove that when it comes to fashion New York is the place to
be. New York appeared in 478 of the 10,000 most shared headlines from our
selection of fashion blogs and sites. Words in the most shared articles include
ideas, pictures, outfits, celebrity and Instagram.

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15

Best day of the week

to publish

Across all markets, both business and consumer, content published during the
week performs significantly better than at weekends.
The Tuesday to Thursday period is typically the best, with Tuesday receiving the
highest shares overall.

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Automotive
Charity & NFP
Consumer electronics
Fashion
Financial advice
IT
Marketing
News
Pharma
Travel

Mon
15%
21%
16%
17%
13%
20%
18%
14%
17%
18%

Tues
17%
14%
18%
19%
30%
19%
21%
16%
20%
19%

Wed
18%
16%
19%
18%
13%
20%
20%
15%
22%
17%

Thurs
17%
17%
19%
18%
9%
20%
19%
17%
23%
19%

Fri
16%
15%
15%
16%
18%
16%
17%
18%
15%
17%

Sat
9%
8%
7%
7%
2%
2%
3%
11%
2%
6%

16

Sun
9%
8%
6%
5%
14%
2%
2%
9%
2%
4%

The weekend winners are news and financial advice but even their readership is
well below their mid-week averages.
Based on this research you could argue against ever publishing content on a
weekend, however there is a lot less competition, particularly in B2B markets, so
it can be worth trying.

Market Summary

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Appendix

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27

Websites used in the

research

Automotive
just-auto.com carmagazine.co.uk autoevolution.com autoweek.
com autonews.com autoblog.com roadandtrack.com leftlanenews.
com motorauthority.com autoevolution.com jalopnik.com topspeed.com
carscoops.com motortrend.com cardesignnews.com thecarconnection.com
just-auto.com goauto.com.au thetruthaboutcars.com connectedcar-news.com
hemmings.com carbuzz.com cars.com edmunds.com cargurus.com carmax.
com thecarconnection.com
Charity
ageuk.org.uk actionaid.org.uk actionforblindpeople.org.uk alzheimers.org.
uk arthritisresearchuk.org banardos.org.uk bbcchildreninneed.co.uk bhf.
org.uk britishlegion.org.uk cancerresearchuk.org christianaid.org.uk dec.
org.uk diabetes.org.uk gavi.org gosh.org guidedogs.org.uk helpforheroes.
org.uk islamic-relief.org macmillan.org.uk mariecurie.org.uk mssociety.org.uk
muslimaid.org nspcc.org.uk oxfam.org.uk pdsa.org.uk redcross.org.uk rnli.
org rspb.org.uk rspca.org.uk salvationarmy.org.uk
Consumer Electronics
engadget.com t3.com slashgear.com homecinemaguru.com gizmodo.
co.uk androidcentral.com 9to5mac.com cultofmac.com bgr.com slrlounge.
com fareastgizmos.com geeky-gadgets.com 7gadgets.com redferret.
net ubergizmo.com techcrunch.com/gadgets pocket-lint.com dpreview.com
dcviews.com appleinsider.com pcadvisor.co.uk
Fashion
manrepeller.com inchandup.blogspot.co.uk theblondesalad.com stylebubble.
co.uk atlantic-pacific.blogspot.co.uk songofstyle.com shewearsfashion.
com sincerelyjules.com seaofshoes.typepad.com ella-lapetiteanglaise.com
camilleovertherainbow.com advancedstyle.blogspot.co.uk nadiaaboulhosn.com
fashionista.com parkandcube.com peonylim.com glamourmagazine.co.uk
whowhatwear.com garypeppergirl.com helenabordon.com fashionmenow.co.uk
the-frugality.com weworewhat.com thehautepursuit.com thefashionguitar.com
wishwishwish.net
Financial advice
bankingadvice.com bankaccountadvice.co.uk smallbusiness.
co.uk moneyadviceservice.org.uk money.co.uk moneyfacts.co.uk
moneysavingexpert.com moneywise.co.uk knowyourmoney.co.uk

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28

Information Technology
informationweek.com cio.com computerworld.com zdnet.com networkworld.
com darkreading.com techtarget.com techopedia.com computerhope.com
computerweekly.com itpro.co.uk techworld.com theregister.co.uk infoworld.
com computerworlduk.com pcworld.com
Marketing
b2bmarketing.net blog.mailchimp.com brandrepublic.com bufferapp.
com buzzsumo.com campaignlive.co.uk chiefmartec.com cmo.com
contentmarketinginstitute.com copyblogger.com econsultancy.com hubspot.
com kissmetrics.com marketingprofs.com marketingweek.com marketo.com
moz.com mycustomer.com searchengineland.com searchenginewatch.com
seobook.com sethgodin.typepad.com signalvnoise.com smartinsights.com
socialmediaexaminer.com sproutsocial.com tfmainsights.com thedrum.com
unbounce.com wordstream.com
News
bbc.co.uk cnn.com dailymail.co.uk huffingtonpost.co.uk independent.co.uk
news.sky.com theguardian.com thetimes.co.uk nytimes.com washingtonpost.
com telegraph.couk ft.com
Pharmaceutical
ajhp.org aphanet.org bstquarterly.com cphi-online.com drugtopics.
modernmedicine.com empr.com europeanpharmaceuticalreview.com
fiercepharma.com gilead.com ispe.org jnj.com dlink.com exacq.com
pharmaceutical-technology.com pharmacypracticenews.com pharmatimes.
com pharmexec.com pmlive.com sanofi.com uspharmacist.com pharmalot.
com pharmastrategyblog.com pharmamkting.blogspot.com drug-injury.
com pharmacycheckerblog.com drugmonkey.blogspot.com blog.pharmexec.
com druganddevicelaw.blogspot.com chemicalregister.com rdchemicals.
com pharmainfosource.com indianpharma.in pharmaceuticalonline.
com cafepharma.com pharma-iq.comatimes.compharmexec.com
pharmamanufacturing.com pharmtech.com

Travel
lonelyplanet.com mrandmrssmith.com wanderlust.co.uk gogobot.com
inyourpocket.com adioso.com seat61.com coolcamping.co.uk skift.
com gadling.com hipmunk.com londonist.com secret-london.co.uk slh.
com i-escape.com welove2ski.com theweekenders.co.uk 501places.com
thehotelguru.com greentraveller.co.uk baldhiker.com grumpytraveller.com
travelfish.org travellerspoint.com tingo.com ifly.com

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About us

29

Technology for
Marketing (TFM)
The UKs leading marketing technology event takes place 28-29th September,
Olympia London. Highlights of this years event include:
l

l
l

200+ speakers in 15 theatres across the event with killer keynotes, A.I.
fasterclasses and experiments in Neuromarketing.
Discover new marketing tech from over 100 technology vendors
TFM under the same roof as eCommerce Expo and Customer Contact Expo,
covering the complete customer journey.

Dont miss the Science of Content BuzzSumo/TFM presentation on 29th

September.

www.technologyformarketing.co.uk

BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps content marketers create better content through research,
amplification and monitoring.
1. Research to understand what content resonates with an audience, including
the most shared content, trending content today, what is working on Facebook,
competitor top content and the content formats and headlines gaining most
traction.
2. Understanding who is amplifying content through sharing and linking.
Identifying the influencers and top authors for any topic, seeing all the
people that share your content or competitors content and building
outreach lists.
3. Sophisticated monitoring including alerts (real time and daily
digests) when new content on a topic is published, when your
brand is mentioned, when competitors publish new content, when
someone links to your site or competitor sites.

www.buzzsumo.com