Analyzed 3.6 Billion Articles. Here’s what we learned about evergreen content
To better understand evergreen content, we analyzed 3.6 million articles.
We looked at several factors, including content formats and promotion channels that could lead to evergreen content publishing.
We learned a lot from BuzzSumo about the reasons certain content continues receiving shares and links over time.
Let’s dive into the data.
Here is a quick summary of our key findings:
1. How-to posts and List posts are the “most evergreen” content formats. Presentations, press releases and Press Releases tend to be the most infrequent.
2. Podcast episodes are rarely shared over time. Podcasts are 4.28x more likely to be shared over time than a list post.
3. Reddit users who share a lot of content are more likely to make it evergreen.
4. Articles that receive a lot of engagement on Twitter are very rare to end up getting shares and links in the long-term.
5. Content that includes “2020” or 2021 in the title is highly likely to be shared.
6. Guides, industry reports, and best-of lists are some of the most popular content types.
7. We found that the three most prolific publishers of evergreen content were Social Media Examiner (HBR), Mindful, and Mindful.
8. Verticals that publish the most evergreen content are digital marketing, technology, and health.
9. SEO, fashion, and business are just a few industries that have a low number of evergreen articles.
How-to posts and lists have a high likelihood of becoming evergreen
We wanted to first analyze the effect of content format on articles’ ability to be evergreen.
The topic is clearly a key element in a piece’s longevity, but we speculate that the format could also play a part.
Here are the results:
List posts, as you can see are the most evergreen content format. Then follow “what”, “how-to” and “why” posts.
This is consistent with previous research that found list posts received a lot of shares.
BuzzSumo’s Evergreen metric was used to calculate how long-lasting a piece or content was.
This metric measures shares and links within 30 days of an article’s first publication.
This list post by Healthline, for example, has an extraordinarily high Evergreen score.
Although this post received a lot of shares and links in its early days, it continues to generate traffic years later.
We found that Evergreen scores weren’t evenly distributed across different formats.
A list post is actually 15x more likely than a presentation to be evergreen.
The Key Takeaway: List and How-to posts are the best content formats to help publishers maximize evergreen content.
Podcast Episodes Rarely Evergreen
Podcast episodes are not very durable, according to our research.
It may not surprise people in the podcast industry. Certain podcast episodes are listened to for years after their initial release.
However, podcast apps are often designed to show new episodes that have just been released.
The feeds are actually listed chronologically. This could partly explain why podcast episodes don’t get many social media shares after the first month.
Also, we found that infographics, presentations and press releases tend to be most popular. Then, they fade away. These formats were actually less likely than podcasts to be evergreen.
We thought it would be useful to highlight the fact that podcasts have become a more popular content format.
The key takeaway is that Podcast episodes create buzz very early in their lives. However, very few podcast episodes receive links and shares over the long-term.
Reddit Content with Engagement Has a Strong Chance of Being Evergreen
Next, we want to examine the impact of engagement across different channels on evergreen material.
We examined how evergreen content was correlated to the four most popular social networks.
These are our findings
Our data set showed that content with high Reddit engagement had a high chance of being shared over time.
Why is this possible?
Like any social platform, Reddit’s users
Reddit , however, is not like other platforms. It also has a lot of users who are interested in timeless content. You can also include entertainment articles and videos from years ago.
Here’s an example of a Reddit engagement for an article in our data set:
(This article also received a high evergreen score.
This content is different from a news article or a piece of TMZ. People can gain value for months, years, and even decades from the moment it goes live.
Reddit can be used as a “litmus test” to determine which niche topics are most likely to yield evergreen content.
The key takeaway: Reddit engagement strongly correlates with an article’s potential to generate links and shares over the course of time.
Twitter shares don’t correlate with high Evergreen scores
We found that content with a lot of shares and retweets doesn’t have high evergreen scores.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who is familiar with Twitter. Twitter is all about the present and now. In fact, Twitter’s tagline says “Happening Now”.
You should also consider the fact that Twitter is full of news articles, which are often heavily shared. These articles don’t get much interest once they’re shared.
Also, we found that Pinterest pins did not correlate with blog posts’ ability to become evergreen. It’s possible for pin content to appear in users’ feeds even after it’s shared. This is unlike Twitter.
Based on our data, however, it appears that heavy Pinterest pins early on does not necessarily mean an article will receive long-term shares and links.
The Key Takeaway: Twitter followers have very little to do with the ability of a piece content to become evergreen.
Posts with the current year in their title are likely to become evergreen
We found that articles with the current year’s title had a high likelihood of becoming evergreen.
This finding may seem surprising at first. This is because content that’s centered on one year is more likely to be less relevant over time.
There are two reasons why focusing on the present year can increase the chances that your content will be evergreen.
Content with new information can get shared and linked to. This effect lasts for a long time.
(Remember, BuzzSumo’s Evergreen score tracks engagements that occur after 30 days.
So depending on the month that a post was published for the first time, there may still be months of sharing within the year.
Here’s an example: This post contains the current year. It also has a high evergreen score.
This rare post is relevant from the moment it’s published. It can be still useful months later.
Second, posts featuring the current year’s content weren’t always published in that year.
This post, for example, was published in 2017.
The title does not include “2021”. This is because the post was updated in this year. Offering readers new or updated content is likely to lead to more shares.
We also found that including the year in blog post titles is more effective than previous years.
Particularly, articles that had “2020” or 2021 in their titles had a median Evergreen score 33. This is significantly higher than previous year.
This could simply be because there is so much more information available than ever before. Users are looking for shortcuts, such as titles that contain “2021”, to find relevant and up-to-date information.
This could be because 2020 and 2021 are dominated by coronavirus. People increasingly viewed content published before COVID as irrelevant, considering the global response to the virus. A post with “2020” or 2021 would be considered relevant.
Key Takeaway – Incorporating the current year into your title and tag can increase shareability over the short and long terms.
Evergreen Content Types include Best Of Lists Reports and Studies
Next, we looked into the content types that are most likely to produce evergreen content.
We identified the top-performing formats (list posts and how-to posts) above. There are many variations of these formats.
A comprehensive list of dog breeds will be different from a list with tips and tricks for optimizing your website’s SEO.
Both are technically listed posts. However, the final result may be quite different.
We wanted to explore a variety of popular content types. We also wanted to determine which content types are best for marketers who want to produce more evergreen content.
We looked at terms that were often found in titles of high-evergreen content to do this.
Here are the results:
The highest Evergreen scores are associated with content that is focused on the “best”
This shows readers value content that curates and shares the best apps, videos, products, and social media accounts all in one place.
Here’s an example:
Guides are another type of content that is timeless.
Guides, like “best” posts in the past, are useful because they save time. Instead of curating the most valuable items, guides are essentially curating information.
Forbes’ beginner’s guide on blockchain continues to receive shares and links over 4 years after its publication.
Also, we found that titles that contained “data”, reports”, study”, science”, facts and research had high evergreen scores.
This indicates that users are eager for data-driven information.
Here’s an example of one article that we looked at:
This piece was created in 2018. It continues to generate backlinks.
Finally, people share content that is about “the future” or “trends over time. This makes sense because people are constantly on the lookout to see what’s next. These trend-related posts can be very long-lasting, as long as they have a long outlook.
Here’s a great example of a post that is always relevant and focused on current trends:
The Key Takeaway: Users are looking for information that is both curated and consolidated in one place.
Social Media Examiner (HBR), and Mindful Regularly Publish Evergreen Material
We had already analyzed many factors that are associated with evergreen content. We wanted to find out which publishers were the most successful in creating it.
We analyzed BuzzSumo domains that had published at least 10,000 articles.
Here are the results:
We looked at Social Media Examiner and HBR. Mindful, Brain Pickings, Visual Capitalist, and HBR all publish timeless content at top-level levels.
While each site covers different types of content or topics, there are common threads that link their content.
These publishers rely heavily on content formats, which we have already found correlate strongly with evergreen content.
Social Media Examiner publishes content only in these formats.
HBR focuses heavily on how to content.
Mindful is known for writing a lot of “what” and ‘why” posts, which are highly correlated with Evergreen scores.
To make sure that the content is timeless, it’s outlined from scratch.
Content that isn’t truly evergreen, such as the content Social Media Examiner publishes, has been created from scratch so that it can be updated regularly.
This post, for example, from Social Media Examiner, is likely to be out of date due to LinkedIn’s UI updates.
However, the strategies and core content will not stop working anytime soon. The post will only need some minor tweaks (and new screenshots) over the next 12-18 month.
The key takeaway: Publishers who produce the most evergreen content tends to concentrate on evergreen content types and effective content formats. They also focus on topics people will be interested in many years from now.
The highest evergreen content is about technology, marketing and health
Which verticals tend to publish the most evergreen content?
We analyzed 12 verticals to answer the question. We sorted them according to their average evergreen scores.
These are the results:
Content about digital marketing, content management, health, and entertainment are all highly enduring.
Here’s an example of a blog post on marketing that has a high Evergreen score.
However, content that is related to fashion, finance, and business will have lower evergreen scores.
These findings are not surprising to anyone working in the content industry. These findings are not surprising, as we discussed in our discussion about Social Media Examiner. A fair amount of marketing-related content can be made to last forever (or be made more timeless with some tweaks).
The same applies to health-related content. Articles about health, like marketing content, need to be updated over time. However, the advice and guidelines are quite durable.
Here’s an example:
Contrarily, fashion and finance content tends to be more about the events or fads that are happening in the present day or week.
The Key Takeaway: Verticals that publish the most evergreen content are marketing, technology and health.
Conclusion
This concludes our analysis. I hope you found this analysis interesting and helpful.
This study was made possible by Henley Wing, Louise Linehan of BuzzSumo.
Now it’s your turn to share your thoughts.
Did you find any of these results surprising? Or maybe you have a question.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
The post We Analyzed More Than 3.6 Billion Articles. This is What We Learned About Evergreen Content.