To be honest: very bad!
Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2025 8:45 am
Those who cannot afford the luxury of getting their content in front of their audience for a fee must rely on people who are willing to share that content. Research shows that most messages on social media are shared sporadically. But given the increasing flow of new content, few content marketers seem to care. Is that right? And how bad is it if your content is not or hardly shared?
Time to take a closer look at the worst consequences. Before I do that, I want to discuss the aforementioned research, which shows that sharing is the exception rather than the rule.
A share is scarce
Two years ago, Buzzsumo examined a whopping 1,000,000 posts (!). They came to the surprising conclusion that half of this content received only 8 shares or less. Three quarters of the posts received less than 39 shares. The results are in line with earlier findings from Trackmaven. This provider of Marketing Analytics Software found that 42 percent of professionally marketed blog posts received less than 10 interactions.
Lousy numbers then. American numbers, yes, and from two years ago. But I don't get job function email database the impression that Americans are less inclined to share and that more content was published two years ago. On the contrary.
So we can assume that our content is shared poorly on average. Should we care about the consequences or can we continue to offer new content without any worries? Considering how little effort it took me to come up with the list below, you would say that we should care about the consequences.
1. You are missing out on target audience reach
Many see shares as something extra, as a bonus, because it is 'normal' that content is shared little. But is that normal? Suppose you have 200 colleagues with an average of 500 connections and you manage to arrange for 100 people to share your message via LinkedIn. Then you are talking about a (gross) reach of 100,000 people. So you are missing out on that reach. Okay, due to overlap in connections, the net reach may be a bit lower, but it is still considerable. And contact frequency is also worth something.
Time to take a closer look at the worst consequences. Before I do that, I want to discuss the aforementioned research, which shows that sharing is the exception rather than the rule.
A share is scarce
Two years ago, Buzzsumo examined a whopping 1,000,000 posts (!). They came to the surprising conclusion that half of this content received only 8 shares or less. Three quarters of the posts received less than 39 shares. The results are in line with earlier findings from Trackmaven. This provider of Marketing Analytics Software found that 42 percent of professionally marketed blog posts received less than 10 interactions.
Lousy numbers then. American numbers, yes, and from two years ago. But I don't get job function email database the impression that Americans are less inclined to share and that more content was published two years ago. On the contrary.
So we can assume that our content is shared poorly on average. Should we care about the consequences or can we continue to offer new content without any worries? Considering how little effort it took me to come up with the list below, you would say that we should care about the consequences.
1. You are missing out on target audience reach
Many see shares as something extra, as a bonus, because it is 'normal' that content is shared little. But is that normal? Suppose you have 200 colleagues with an average of 500 connections and you manage to arrange for 100 people to share your message via LinkedIn. Then you are talking about a (gross) reach of 100,000 people. So you are missing out on that reach. Okay, due to overlap in connections, the net reach may be a bit lower, but it is still considerable. And contact frequency is also worth something.