In the 1920s, the average consumption of informative and promotional contents was about 2 hours per day. Now, a century later, we talk about 11 hours per day: we are close to Content Shock, the threshold over which a human being can neither physiologically nor phycologically stand any additional content.
Nevertheless, the quantity of contents being created and published every day continues to increase, and it decidedly exceeds the time we can spend on them. That is proven by the steady fall of views and interactions over the Internet. According to Buzzsumo, online WordPress pages reached a peak in March 2017 with 24.5 billion views, but figures have sistematically dropped after that. Social content sharing halved, from an average of 8 in 2015 to 4 in 2017. Only statistics around music videos remained stable in the last years.
The quantitive explosion of contents is not helping, of course, as well as the saturation of almost all new topics. In the tech industry, for instance, it’s hard to find a company which haven’t tried to run after trend topics such as #IoT, #blockchain, #bitcoin, #AR and similar. Content providers should consider that, when competition on the same keywords increases, results are inversely proportional.
Another explanation lies in the evolution of social algorithms, Facebook above all, that penalise not only clickbait posts (that’s a good news), but the potential organic reach and referral traffic for brands and publishers.
Should we stop creating contents, or being satisfied with mediocre results? No. But content marketing has probabily come to a turning point. We should play our cards in a different way, and better define the objectives to be reached. This could trigger sharper campaigns and, keeping in mind the limited fruition capability of our audience, leverage the best possible channels to engage a certain number of people and, most importantly, the right target. It’s not only about sponsored posts or advertising, but the strategic activation of all those tools which are nowadays available for brand managers.
The other investment area is quality. If performance is often disappointing, there are companies with growing engagement and share rates. Not only National Geographic, Harvard Business Review or the Economist. Lots of brands succeed in producing authoritative and relevant contents for a precise target audience, with a growth of interactions on their LinkedIN account up to 60% year over year.
Quality contents boost private sharing, thus sharing through private messaging (e-mails, Whatsapp, Messenger, etc.) or platforms where links are copied but not published. Private sharing is about two times bigger than public sharing. And generates most business conversations, the real KPI for brands working on content content marketing.
