Manifesto
How attention flows on the web
If you’ve read any of my previous posts on this topic you’ll know that I believe the majority of the marketing industry present an at best overly optimistic and at worst completely false picture of how useful it is to engage in large-scale web publishing efforts.
The above is yet another piece to add to the canon:
“From a sample of 612,212 articles published over 72 hours in April, we measured the total sharing activity for each. We found that 527,793, or 86% of the articles, never saw any engagement on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a long, long tail.”
Furthermore only 0.02% achieved 10,000 to 100,000 interactions.
0.0005% achieved over 100,000 interactions. Five ten-thousandths of a percent!
Marketing is about delivering a relevant message. Easy to do for those who show intent or have indicated prior interest, but to achieve greater awareness you need to have massive reach in order to stand any chance of being seen. The implication here is that relying on social sharing to deliver that at scale is a terrifically difficult proposition.
This is what I have said repeatedly, all along.
However, the same site also carries posts such as this: People Are Sharing More News Than Ever On Facebook. From this it is easy to look at the numbers and commit the logical fallacy that this means that your stories stand a greater chance of receiving a slice of this attention. In actual fact you already have to be one of the ‘winners’ in as much if you aren’t already a major hub the chances of your content being shared is approaching zero. Even if you’re a major publisher you’ll still be subject to the brutal effect of the long tail.
This is why ‘brand’ content destinations are a terrible idea.