
How Much Content is Produced Online in 60 Seconds?
mostYou may have noticed a bit of a lull in my posting of recent. While publishing daily has become part of my DNA in recent years, I’m also challenged with advancing the site and providing more and more features. Yesterday, for example, I continued with a project to integrate relevant whitepaper recommendations to the site. It’s a project that I shelved about a year ago and so I took my writing time and turned it into coding time.
Did you miss me? Most likely not… there are a ton of resources out there publishing amazing content. I’m not under any illusion that I stand out as the best – I simply love sharing my discoveries and helping to educate those of you who subscribed and follow my blog to continue providing you insight into the tools and information online that I discover, research, and learn about.
That said, the volume of noise produced is simply deafening… and it’s not getting any better. The folks at Moz did a comprehensive content analysis with BuzzSumo and found:
- The majority of business-related posts published receive few shares and even fewer links, most less than 2 interactions on Facebook.
- Over half of all business-related tweets had 11 or fewer shares. I’m sure some of this is due to the behavior of Twitter users, but it still points to effort without return by companies.
- Over 75% of business posts had zero external links so if the goal was capturing organic search… the vast majority of businesses are failing miserably at acquiring organic traffic.
- 85% of written content had less than 1,000 words despite over 1,000 words consistently receiving more shares and links.
The Case For Less Content
Early this year, we launched an online strategy for a pest control company here in Indianapolis. Their previous strategy was an outdated plethora of multiple domains with thousands of internal, keyword-rich pages. It was a content machine that ran for months to attempt to trick the algorithms… and it didn’t work. The site jumped in rankings and then fell to a point where it could literally be found in the index.
We analyzed all the regional companies and any associated content they produced online to achieve superior rankings from our new client. We honestly found a ton of content out there – but very few remarkable or detailed pages. Rather than adding to the noise, we did research on one topic at a time and produced a content library of pests that was written with humor, included tons of visuals, and we started to produce infographics and checklists for the site.
The result is that, within months, the site dominates the rankings. It was terribly hard work and the content was both time-consuming and expensive… but the result is that it worked. Less content can produce greater business results when the effort is put into it.
As you look to this infographic and see the trends of content creation within one minute on the web over the last few years, there lies an incredible opportunity. Produce remarkable content and your content will be the king amongst pawns.
Our ’60 seconds’ infographic visualises what happens in just one minute on the web. The number of Google searches, Facebook posts and WhatsApp messages sent in a mere 60 seconds is truly phenomenal! First published last year, we’ve now updated it for 2017, showing the statistics for the past three years. Robert Allen, Smart Insights.