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36 Comments 
3 minutes
I ran a poll in the sidebar here for a few days asking people what their main goals were for 2010 in terms of internet marketing. The two clear favourites were: “Quitting your job to make a living online” and “Increase website traffic”. The latter, of course, is people looking for more eyeballs on their content. And, although it may not be obvious, so is the first.
You can make a beautiful, well-structured site that contains excellent content, but it isn’t going to make any money unless it starts getting visitors. No matter what webmasters like to say is ‘king’ online these days, everything we do is for traffic. It’s what matters on the web.
Because of this, I constantly share with you guys new ways to get traffic to your site. For example, I wrote this post on how I rank for 66,000 visitors worth of keywords on Google and the lessons behind the most popular blog posts (in terms of links) on some big blogs. That second post went down very well, so I’ve decided to publish something similar.
I’ve picked 10 high-quality blogs and taken their top two most tweeted posts of all time and analysed what makes them popular. This should help give you tons of article ideas and allow you to see the type of content that Twitter users respond to.
10 Blogs and 20 Posts
I have tried my best to ensure that the posts I have found were the most retweeted articles from the respective sites. There may be some small discrepancies, but I assure you that each of these articles have been very viral with the majority receiving thousands of tweets.
Headline |
Lesson |
Site |
| 13 Types of Posts that Always Get Comments | Lists posts are often popular and this one from Darren is no exception. Try finding something that your audience wants and give it to them in a practical list. |  |
| 5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours | If there’s one thing we like more than getting things done, it’s getting things done quicker. Note down the things that are most important to your audience, and write a guide on how the process can be sped up. | |
| Exclusive: Google Nexus One Hands-On |
Get early access to new products or services and give them in-depth coverage on your site before the competition. |  |
| Phil Schillier Keynote Live | Go to a big industry conference or press-event and live blog the coverage. I’ve personally found this to work well in many industries. | |
| Google In Talks to Acquire Twitter | If you talk about a service, there’s always a large number of their users that are going to care. Talking about Twitter is obviously still hot with their users |  |
| Facebook Acquires FriendFeed | Be the first to announce breaking news in your industry and get the message out there as quickly as possible. | |
| Facebook’s New Terms of Service | Share any flaws or your disappointments with a popular service that many people also use. If relevant, highlight any issues that could affect them personally. |  |
| KFC Has a New Bacon Sandwich | Use your blog not only to share news that is relevant to your audience, but updates that are completely ‘out there’ when it comes to creativity. | |
| 61 Free Apps We’re Most Thankful For | Run an end-of-year compilation that contains the favourite tools you use or freebies out there your audience may be interested in. |  |
| Google Wave 101 | Write an in-depth guide for a new service that your entire industry is talking about. |  |
| Michael Jackson Rushed to the Hospital | Breaking news is always going to help set sites apart from others. When it’s the death of a major celebrity, then people are going to care. |  |
| DJ AM Dies | Again, the rule of breaking news applies here. Tragedy and shock to any audience is always going to gain attention. |  |
| 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business | Writing about a service is always going to be popular to users of that service. Twitter has a huge userbase that could relate to (and apply) Chris’ post. |  |
| 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Everyday | We live in a world where people want things, and they want them fast. Give your readers your best advice on getting big results in a short amount of time. |  |
| URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Do You Use? | If you’re going to talk about something that millions of people use and use your network to get it in front of them, they’re going to talk about you. |  |
| Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results | Again, Danny shows that announcing big news or asking questions about a popular service always has the chance to go viral. |  |
| 70 Minute Video Review of Star-Wars | If you’re genuinely disappointed in something that thousands or even millions of people love, write about it. Those who agree will come out of their caves. |  |
| First Photos: Alice in Wonderland | If you can get exclusive content in any industry then you’re going to start getting noticed. A great example here in the film niche. |  |
| Mother Lover: Justin Timberlake Mother’s Day Video | Mashable didn’t create the content here, but giving a large audience something that is both humorous and holiday related is always going to go down well. |  |
| Microsoft Apologizes for Photoshop Trainwreck | I don’t recommend ‘outing’ companies but if they’re going to make such silly mistakes then highlighting them can flood your website with traffic. |  |
Post Length
As another interesting ‘lesson’, I decided it would be good to see if there was a certain length of content that Twitter users prefer. Do longer articles go down well, or is quick-to-read copy the best?
After manually checking the statistics for each post, here are the stats:
- Shortest article: 131 words
- Longest article: 6,033 words
- Average length: 1,118 words
- Average length of text-focused articles: 1,342
Here is also a graph of the data taken:
I’m personally quite surprised to see that the average length of content that Twitter users seem to like is over 1,000 words. Of course, the message of the content matters far more than how many words it is said in, and short content can still do well. Nevertheless, I still find the results interesting. When we looked at the most linked to blog posts on the web, it also turned out that the most popular posts all had over 1,000 words.
I know I’m one of few bloggers writing that much content per post in this niche. How many are there in yours?
In Summary
I love doing posts like this because it’s clear to see what is working on the top social media sites and what isn’t. No speculations; just pure fact. I did something similar recently with the most linked to blog posts ever which had a great reaction but also one common suggestion: include a broader range of sites across different industries.
I did mention that sites in a lot of other industries “just” need to break news to become popular, but I have still broadened my coverage. I hope this shows that I love the feedback you guys give and I’m always open to more. On that note, if there are any other social sites or stats related posts you would like me to write, you know where the comments are.
36 Comments
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This is great stuff. (Would be greater still if I’d found one of my own posts here though) š In all seriousness, this is something I will definitely consider when planning my blog posts.
Thanks for this useful article.
Hey Anne,
Glad you liked the post, and you’re very welcome!
Yeah i’m agree with your analysis that average highest tweeted posts have 1000+ words. I tested it myself on the post http://www.honeytechblog.com/top-50-twitter-tracking-and-analytics-tools/, where i get 1400+ Re Tweets.
I’ll recommend your post / analysis to include lengthy and descriptive posts.
Thanks.
Another good example, Honey.
Although I think in that case, the focus on Twitter was probably a reason for such popularity. Still, great job and nice piece!
Thanks for your comment š
Longer posts which contain usable information are extremely valuable. Some of the best posts on my site are over 1,000 words long.
I completely agree. It’s just nice for me to have some ‘real’ data. I see far too many people spouting what they think works rather than looking at what actually does.
Great to see you over here, Michael!
Very interesting facts my friend! Good job breaking it down into easy to understand and relate-able bites for the everyday blogger.
The commonality in every single one of your examples is that is poses a question that needs to be answered. Even the headline “Michael Jackson Rushed to the Hospital” which sounds like a statement and not a fact, asks… what happened to Micheal? Is he o.k.?, what hospital was he brought to?
And, of course, your headline (What You Can Learn From The Most Tweeted Blog Posts Ever) also poses questions that just must be answered! What are the posts? Who posted them? What did the posts state? How can I use this info in my posts? What can I learn from these posts?
Great stuff!
Hi David,
There’s definitely the sense of “I need to know more” after a few of those titles, as if they are missing the crucial answer which I am sure draws people in.
Well spotted, I hadn’t thought of it in that way (which is why I love this community).
Thanks for stopping by, buddy.
Definitely shows that there are a lot of ways to get retweets! I am very surprised that the average article length was over 1,000 words.
Hey Tom,
Yep, contrary to what a lot of ‘experts’ put out there, it does seem like long content is working well.
I’ve found the most effective way of getting tweets (for me at least) is to do a list post… the more points the better. It’s all about posting things that go viral (as you well know, judging by your blog name and your other posts!), and I’ve found list posts do well. The higher the number of list objects, the more tweets it gets, which is what I’ve found.
However, surely blogs get to a point where it doesn’t matter *too much* what they post, as they’ll always get tweets. Take problogger for instance, I visited one of his articles a while back literally 2 minutes after it ws posted, and it already had a couple of hundred of retweets (probably through things like twitterfeed)
For a small blog I’m not sure how practical it is to do a post about a new product, for example. Why? Because the big blogs will post about it around the same time, and all the attention will go to them as they have more followers, more authority and, more importantly, more people interested in what they have to say. I mean, if I posted about a new Twitter feature on my medium sized blog, and then Mashable posted about it… who’s gonna get more tweets?!
Hey Simon,
Interesting that you’ve found that to be the case. I know that list titles can be enticing, of course, but I have seen quite a few still fall flat on Twitter, even when they get a lot of attention.
I agree that bigger blogs get more tweets easier, but remember I picked their most tweeted posts. These are articles that stand out from their posts which usually get a few hundred tweets and I’ve looked at why.
Do you think Mashable and TechCrunch were the only sites posting about startup / web news when they started out? Of course not, they had competition which could not compete with their news over time.
I believe anyone else can do the same.
– Glen
Great post Glen. Some really helpful stuff!
Several months ago I’ve found an interesting analysis made by Sysomos. It can be found here: http://sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ the title is “An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World”. Really good stuff. You should check it out if you haven’t already š
Awesome link, thanks for sharing.
It is a little dated, but fascinating nontheless.
– Glen
You make some great points here, I think you break the headlines down very well. Thanks so much for doing all of that manual research, they are very interesting results.
That’s are really interesting perspective on what’s working. I, personally like reading posts that are shorter and only have a few exceptions, this being one, to that rule. I have usually written my posts to the length I would want to see.
Hmmm… I may have to rethink the length of my posts or better yet maybe I should ask my readers what they’d like to see in a poll.
Thanks Glen
Just a thought, but maybe the common denominator was that each of the above blogs is insanely popular… I may have said this before on here, but my advice to get lots of tweets? Have thousands of readers.
I’m addign this as a corollary to the above post, I assume these posts were also the most tweeted on the site.
Hi Eric,
I actually answered that above. Yes, these sites do get hundreds of tweets per post generally (no matter what it is) but the post I highlighted here were even exceptional for these sites, getting thousands of tweets.
Excellent post. I am just about to start blogging (for ‘the latter’) and will refer to this guide regularly.
My word that was interesting, Glen. And useful. I hope this post breaks all your records. Many thanks. P. š
We’ll see. It would be funny if it broke my retweet record (around 200) š
Thanks for the comment, Paul!
Glen, thanks for this. I agree with Eric C. I will be writing an article on Blogging advice and how useful it really is an upcoming issue. At the moment I’m just having some fun and experimenting with my blog -finding out what works and what doesn’t work through trial and error.
Hi Glen.
Cool presentation of the material. I like how the items come out looking in your table there. The logos fit in very well.
Your analysis is appreciated, because while anyone might be able to do it, the actual implementation of it is not so common.
Nice to see where some big retweetage occurred.
It took me a while that you need to write for people not just for google. I have found that for my industry 1000 words is just about right.. and if im on a hot topic i can go even longer. yes it takes longer to write 1k words vs 300 words but if you get 5x the benefit well then it really works out. also you can see in the title that most of the posts “promise” to deliver something…
PS. Your chart uber sucks. It makes no sense. You should really label the axis if you would like us to get anything out of it.
I love you david.
If you don’t understand the graph, there’s not much more I can do. It was a simple addition to the post, but hey..some people are picky š
Y axis = word count
x axis = each individual blog post
“Iām personally quite surprised to see that the average length of content that Twitter users seem to like is over 1,000 words.” – This was very interesting Glen. Especially considering I’ve heard on the web that readers like brevity and they tend to skim a lot.
As for stats-related posts – it might be interesting to see you break down the average word length of popular posts by category…for instance, personal development, finance, technology, etc. This way we can see the benchmarks for different industries/categories. Just a thought. PS. I understood your graph, although thanks for clearing it up in the replies š
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Hey Glen, I just started blogging a couple weeks ago (on my 25th birthday to be exact) I had a ton of stories and finally just committed to ‘doing.’ I just came across your blog today, and want to thank you for the valuable information! Thanks, Your newest fan and subscriber: OlinP
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Over the last year I have been working on the assumption that internet readers like only short articles. Your excelent article shows exactly the opposite and that is a big surprise. Many thanks for sharing!
Sergio Acosta, what I would say is big article or short article both work on internet if you have provided what people like. The main question is if short articles work then why to write long article?
Depending on the subject an article may be short or long if any article needs explanation and you are just writing sub heading then it may not be understandable to general public so you also have to think from visitors point of view, all visitors have not equal power of understanding.