As you know, content marketing and social media marketing are very much dependent on each other if you wish to attain any kind of success. Social media relies on good content in order to drive engagement, while your content relies on social media in order to get exposure.

Keeping this in mind, it’s important that each time when you want to create a piece of content, you better make sure that your blog post will get its shares or likes as much as possible. Well, I do understand that it is much easier said than done – after all, content doesn’t grow on trees, right!

Which is why in this article, I will show you some of the most popular blog posts that you should be writing more from now on, in order to get the most social shares and likes for every blog posts of yours.

Types of popular blog posts

There are specific types of popular blog posts that readers tend to be more attracted to and will be more willing to share. While creating certain types of content won’t necessarily translate into instant success, knowing what is and what isn’t shareable will help guide you in your content creation process. The following are 5 of the most popular types of blog posts that have a better chance at being shared on social media:

1) How-to Posts – A how-to post is all about introducing a problem and providing a step-by-step solution to that problem. These types of posts are incredibly popular due to the fact that you are offering content that is of actual use to the reader – it’s not just informative, it’s something that they can apply to better their lives, even if its in a very small way.

For example, “how to make your own eco-friendly cleaning products.” An article like this would begin by presenting a problem, which would be that many store bought cleaning products are fully of chemicals. Then it would provide a tutorial on how to create your own cleaning products. Recipes are another good example of how-to-posts.

Another example would be from a popular blogger, Neil Patel from Quicksprout. If you have been following his blog, you may have noticed that he likes to create this type of how-to post. He did mention a couple of years back that his first blog was a top 100 blog on the Internet, according to Technorati. One reason why it got ranked to the top was that he wrote a lot of how-to posts.

Other interesting headlines include:

• How I Increased My Search Traffic by 47% from Translating My Blog into 82 Languages
• How Many Links Should You Build to Your Website?
• How to Grow Your Blog Traffic by 20,000 Visitors a Month

2) What Posts – What posts tend to be purely informative, but they are more successful when you use comparisons in order to get your information across.

For example, if your post was entitled “What does an SEO do in their day-to-day work”, it would dispel the common misconception that being a SEO is an easy, one-and-done-once-at-the-top thing. However, in this what post, Rand Fishkin, from Moz gives a thorough explanation on what are the things that need to be done in the day-to-day job of an SEO.

Another what-post example would be from Neil Patel’s blog, Quicksprout again.

3) Why Posts – Why posts are informative posts that provide readers with a subject matter and a conclusion. The content should support that conclusion.

For example, “Why a mobile-friendly website is essential to a successful SEO strategy in 2015.” The content on this post will list down some of the important reasons as to why organizations must need to have a mobile-friendly website in 2015. The reasoning will be listed down in a list format for clarity and easier readability.

4) List Posts – A list post is somewhat similar to a how-to post in that you present a problem and a solution, but the list isn’t necessarily a step-by-step process to achieving the solution you set forth, instead, it’s a list of reasons why the reader should use your solution.

For example, a post entitled “10 ways to piss off David Ogilvy (Free Poster)” was written by Demian from Copyblogger.

As stated in the title, he had listed down 10 ways off pissing off Mr. Ogilvy, and what other better way of getting people to read it then by having it all listed down in a list post.

To get a better idea of what this post is about, have a look below:

Lists are very helpful and they are also easy to read, readers can get a gist of what you’re trying to say by simply scanning over the content, which is why these types of posts are so shareable.

5) Video Posts – Video posts are just that, videos that you embed into your blog and that can be shared on social media. Video content often gets more of a response from consumers because of the simple fact that it’s much more visually stimulating to see a person talking about something rather than to read what someone is talking about.

The most shareable types of video posts are videos that are somewhat short in length – anything hovering around the 3-minute mark is very shareable, whereas you’ll lose the attention of much of your audience if you’re posting 30-minute videos.

Videos are also a great way to do how-to posts since you can visually demonstrate your tutorials.

How to ensure that your blog post gets more social shares?

Knowing what type of posts are the most shareable is an important step towards actually making your content more shareable, but it takes much more than that. A poorly written list post isn’t going to go viral just because you wrote it in a list form.

The following are a few tips that will not only improve the quality of your content, but also giving you a great opportunity of having your blog post to be shared happily by your readers:

• Write longer content as opposed to shorter content – Believe it or not, longer content tends to get more shares than shorter content. There’s a misconception out there that shorter content is better because it’s easier for people to read on their mobile phones and many readers simply don’t have the patience to read anything over 500 words.

But if you look at the data below, you’ll find that this isn’t true.

For one, people tend to email longer content way more than shorter content. One of the reasons for this is because longer content tends to be much more in-depth and well researched than shorter content, which means it’s more informative and helpful to readers. People are much more likely to share content that has value, and longer content usually has more value than shorter content.
• Include images with your posts – Don’t underestimate how powerful an image can be. Adding a relevant image to your post can help readers identify what your content is about immediately. Possibly more important than that is the fact that an image will add visual interest to your content and help break up your text.A wall of text can be a little overwhelming, and many readers will choose not to read it if the content looks too daunting. Breaking up that text with images will help make it look easier to read – as silly as that might sound, it’s proven to be effective.

  If you take a look at Facebook’s share data, you’ll find that posts with thumbnail images get three times the amount of shares as those without them.

• Invoke awe, laughter or amusement– These are the three emotions that people want to feel and the ones that you should try to invoke when creating a shareable post.Out of the top 10,000 shared articles, 25 percent invoked awe, 17 percent invoked laughter and 15 percent invoked amusement.

What do these three emotions have in common? They make us feel good.

It’s as simple as that. And guess what? Most people feel joy out of making other people feel good, which means that they are much more likely to share posts that invoke these emotions.

• Focus on lists and infographics – Lists and infographics are a great way to provide information that readers can read with just a quick glance. Infographics are especially effective because they provide data backing a conclusion you’ve made in a visual manner, making it easier to get across data that might be slightly more dull in text form. Lists and infographics also happen to get more average shares than any other type of content.

For example: Visme

A great place for you to create some interesting infographics and other engaging content. You can now start creating your very own infographics, with tons of beautiful templates to choose from and without having to do any special coding.
• Try to post new content on Tuesdays – This may seem like an odd piece of advice, but when you post your content, you need to know when is the best time to post on different social media platforms. This is to ensure your post will get the necessary amount of exposure it needs. According to recently collected data from Linkedin, Tuesday is the best day of the week to get the most clicks and shares.

Always bear in mind that your visitors and followers prefer to use social media sites at different hours. Therefore it is highly advisable that you check for the best time for you to post on these social platforms.
• Highlight the author – Connecting all of your content by headlining the author of the material is a good way to help build your brand identity as well as your brand trust. Readers will recognize the name of the author and look for other content that he or she has written.When you attach a name to your content, you give your readers someone to trust, which makes them more likely to share pieces by that specific author. To help increase the identity of your brand even more, publish a picture of the author on all of your posts.

  You should also consider signing up to Google+ if you haven’t already as well so that you can take advantage of their authorship tool, which allows Google’s algorithm to more easily identify and track your content via your author, which will help to improve your search engine ranking, thereby increasing exposure.

  The more exposure a piece of content has, the more of a shareable post it becomes.

When posting content, the first thing you should do is ensure that the content is of high quality. Whatever you are writing on, make sure it will bring benefits to your readers because you don’t want to concentrate all your effort on creating a post to the point where it detracts from the quality of what you are writing.

But if you want to make them popular, then you need to make sure that you craft your content in a way that attracts your readers hearts and once you can achieved that, they will be so willing to share it with their friends or with their social groups without having you to ask them. Besides, make sure you keep track of all your blog posts performances by tracking them in Google Analytics so that you will be able which types of popular blog posts work best for you and then write more on it.

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[This blog post was originally written and published by Ben Seow on May 14, 2015. It is most recently updated by Howard Go on Jun 02, 2020]

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Updated: 14 December 2024

About Vivian

Vivian is an anthropologist lost in the world of digital marketing. She has an interest in learning about the science of marketing and the creativity that businesses use to transform themselves into purple cows.