Takeaways:

[su_dropcap style=”light”]1 [/su_dropcap]Article titles that include numbers—commonly known as “listicles”—are the most common category by far, with almost half of all BuzzFeed article titles incorporating a number in some form.

[su_dropcap style=”light”]2 [/su_dropcap]This visualization makes it clear that BuzzFeed’s highest priority has not historically been hard-hitting content; instead, they have found success with topics like food, animals, celebrity gossip, pop culture, and social media commentary.

Which BuzzFeed Headline Categories Are Most Effective with Social Sharing?

Given the disproportionate favoring towards some of these categories, it’s clear BuzzFeed is very adept at leveraging what they know works. BuzzFeed publisher Dao Nguyen has spoken about how the media company has drawn on broad thematic goals for its content production, including the following groupings:

• Humor: “Makes me laugh.” There are so
  many ways to make somebody laugh. You can be laughing at someone, you could
  laugh at specific internet humor, you could be laughing at some good, clean,
  inoffensive dad jokes.
• Identity: “This is me.” Identity.
  People are increasingly using media to explain, “This is who I am.” They
  use relatable content to share specific aspects of themselves, such as their
  upbringing, culture, fandom, guilty pleasures, self-love, and sense of humor.
  This type of digital connection is one of the greatest gifts of the internet.
  It’s amazing when you find a piece of media that precisely describes your bond
  with someone or something.
• Practical/Useful: This group is characterized
  by helpful content that allows someone to complete or solve a task, such as
  DIY, shopping and reviews, learning and education, editorial/news, etc.
• Emotional: Feeling, feeling, feeling. These
  posts have the burden to create an emotional response, evoking feelings such as
  sadness, curiosity, happiness, anger, and despair. Often times, these articles
  are raising awareness of a problem facing humanity or sharing news that is
  meant to restore faith in humanity.

As mentioned, we attempted to go deeper here with our analysis, parsing the top 15K articles into more specific categories within the broader “buckets” listed above.  Using these categories, combined with information on Facebook’s sharing and linking data, some very fascinating trends emerge that have practical implications for all content creators. Some categories of content perform disproportionately well on these important metrics.

Next, we will be looking only at the articles
that could be considered “top
performers,” having earned more than 50,000 Facebook shares.

Let’s take a look at which categories are represented by these widely shared
posts:

Takeaways:

[su_dropcap style=”light”]3 [/su_dropcap]Less than 3% of the top articles we explored earned more than 50,000 shares.

[su_dropcap style=”light”]4 [/su_dropcap]Articles with titles that include words referencing someone’s identity/collective identity and memes are disproportionately represented by a higher than average number of shares. More than 15% of the articles in either of these categories garnered more than 50,000 Facebook shares each. Meanwhile, content related to categories such as Movie Fandom, Race/Ethnicity, and Politicians struggled to compete.

People are more likely to share things that they think their friends will find interesting and relatable such as Identity and Internet culture, rather than polarizing content.

Kristin Tynski, Fractl

 

[su_dropcap style=”light”]5 [/su_dropcap]Shockingly, headlines mentioning Sex/Beauty and Female Celebrities had a smaller representation of posts earning more than 50k Facebook shares. This could because people are turning to other sources, like Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube for their content in these areas.

Topical Categories Group

Now let’s isolate just the Topical Groupings:

Major Takeaway:

[su_dropcap style=”light”]6 [/su_dropcap]Excluding the “Qualitative Impact” grouping, we are left with a good impression of which topics seem to generate the highest levels of social sharing. In particular, somewhat generic aspects of “Internet Culture” seem to dominate, such as Memes and Internet Slang/Jargon. Pets/Animals content also fared well, with more than 12% of related posts garnering more than 50,000 shares.

Qualitative Impact Categories
Group

Lastly, let’s look just at the categories
relating to Qualitative Impact, specifically categories having to do with
identity and specific emotion:

As I’ve investigated in past studies on the emotions of viral content, some emotions have been shown to elicit higher rates of sharing. In this case, the top emotion-based category was not titles that conveyed anticipation, or “Surprise” as we’ve seen with other investigations in past research (though this emotion did beat out Disgust and Anger). The top-performing emotional categories were article titles that conveyed sadness or humor.

However, these emotional categories were
dwarfed by any titles that leveraged feelings around individual or collective
identity. Perhaps this is a reflection of just how powerful identity has become
in the current social conversation. It could be that sites like BuzzFeed are
intentionally creating content and using titles meant to stoke feelings of
in-group/out-group and identity stratification because they know how
effectively this creates social sharing behavior.

Which Categories Are Most
Important for Earning Links?

Facebook shares are important and interesting when considering social dialogue trends. But for the SEO-driven content marketers out there who are thinking about optimization, how do links factor into this research? Which types of content drove the most number of new links for BuzzFeed?

Interestingly,
we observed that the categories that performed well with Facebook shares did
not always translate into high link drivers.

Takeaways

[su_dropcap style=”light”]7 [/su_dropcap]Even though headlines related to politics weren’t heavily shared on Facebook, other media outlets online were using BuzzFeed as a source and linking back to their content. In 2018 BuzzFeed made more efforts to be seen as a news source, and even had their work on Russia, and operatives with ties to Vladimir Putin taking part in targeted killings against Putin’s enemies, make it as a Pulitzer Prize finalist. 

[su_dropcap style=”light”]8 [/su_dropcap]We see categories like Race, Male-related headlines, and surprising content earning links but not social shares. This could be because people are less likely to share polarizing topics on their Facebook feeds, but publishers are using posts like these to start conversations.

[su_dropcap style=”light”]9 [/su_dropcap]Location-based content performed relatively well in link driving, despite being the second-lowest shared category overall across all title groups. This could be due to regional media publishers picking up on BuzzFeed content for news stories.

What About Content Longevity?

BuzzSumo reports an “evergreen score.”

“The Evergreen Score is an internal ranking system developed by BuzzSumo. It measures the number of social engagements and backlinks an article receives 30 days after the article is published. The more engagements an article receives after the initial 30-day period, the higher the score.”

Using this score, along with the article
categorizations, it’s possible to understand which categories drive the future
value in terms of links and social shares. The higher the score, the better the
“longevity” of the content in that category.

The big winners we see with higher than
average overall evergreen scores range across a variety of verticals, such as
Collective Identity, Race/Ethnicity, humorous memes, Animals/Pets, or self-help
tricks and life hacks.

Which Types of Content Does
BuzzFeed Prefer?

It’s also interesting to look at the distribution of the articles by type, meaning the intent and organization of the article itself. This could mean the questions it seeks to answer or the overall goals of the piece. These groupings were determined by BuzzSumo.