If you’re sticking to your content approach from three years ago, it’s now 50% less effective, according to Buzzsumo’s Content Trends Report 2018.
The research shows while the volume of content published continues to increase, new topic areas are getting rapidly saturated with content. An extreme example of this is Bitcoin, which became a popular topic at the end of 2017 with over 40,000 articles a week published on the topic.
Social referral traffic declined in 2017 and was overtaken by traffic from Google, while average sharing on content on social networks fell due to increased competition. According to the report, this saturation means the big winners are sites that have built a strong reputation for original, authoritative content, such as The Economist and Harvard Business Review.
A change in Facebook algorithms has also had an impact on levels of engagement and the type of content that gets shared. As a result, brands are gaining less organic referral traffic from Facebook and less engagement, with fewer viral posts. Clickbait-style headlines are also proving less effective.
Prepare for ‘content shock’
This increase in content publication means greater competition for engagement, says the report, causing ‘content shock’ – when the overhelming amount of content on a niche topic drives up the cost of content marketing to the point it becomes financially unviable. As a topic grows in popularity, publishers and marketers pile in, but it is much harder to gain traction as a content marketer once the topic has reached saturation point.
Bucking the downward trend, however, is LinkedIn, which saw a growth in content sharing last year. Private sharing has also seen a boost, with data from GetSocial suggesting it was twice as large as public sharing in 2017. And unsurprisingly, the report showed there has been more sharing of partisan political or tribal content.
