We took a sample of 10,000 B2B articles featuring the date “2021” in the title, but took our analysis back five years, to discover content that had been published and subsequently updated with a “2021” date.
Then we analyzed the top 50 headlines (based on shares and links) from this sample, and split them up by initial publish date (which you can see in the “X” axis).
We noticed a pattern: The majority of top performing content was actually published years ago, but has since been updated.
In fact, the “2021” content that performed best was published as far back as 2017. It has over double the amount of shares & links as the “2021” content that was actually published in 2021.
This proves we should be optimizing and updating our existing “year” based content, if we want to build strong, cumulative engagement.
For more tips on creating effective evergreen content, check out our Ultimate Guide To Evergreen Content.
