6 Steps to Get AI to Recommend Your Brand

We analyzed 3.6 billion articles to better understand evergreen content.

Specifically, we looked at a number of different factors (including content formats and promotional channels) that may lead to a higher chance of publishing evergreen content.

With the help of our data partner BuzzSumo, we learned a lot about why certain content continues to get shares and links over time.

Here’s a Quick Summary of Our Key Findings:

1. List posts and how-to posts are the two “most evergreen” content formats. Presentations and press releases tend to be the least evergreen.
2. Podcast episodes very rarely get shared over time. In fact, podcasts are 4.28x less likely to be evergreen compared to a list post.
3. Content that’s heavily shared on Reddit has a high likelihood of becoming evergreen.
4. Articles with lots of engagement on Twitter very rarely end up receiving shares and links over the long term.
5. Posts that include “2020” or “2021” in their title tend to be highly evergreen. This shows that content with recent information is more likely to receive shares.
6. Content types with the highest proportion of evergreen content include “best of” lists, guides, data-driven research and industry reports.
7. Among publishers that we analyzed, Social Media Examiner, HBR and Mindful tend to publish the highest amount of evergreen content.
8. Verticals that tend to publish evergreen content most regularly include digital marketing, health, and technology.
9. Industries with relatively low amounts of evergreen articles include SEO, business, and fashion.

How-to Post and Lists Have a High Likelihood of Becoming Evergreen

First, we wanted to analyze the impact of content format on an article’s ability to become evergreen.

While the topic of a piece is obviously a key element of a piece’s interest over time, we hypothesized that the format might play a role as well.

As you can see, list posts are (by far) the content format that tends to become evergreen most often. Followed by how-to posts, “what” posts and “why” posts.

To calculate how evergreen a piece of content was, we used BuzzSumo’s “Evergreen” metric. This metric looks at shares and links that occur 30 days after an article was first published.

For example, this list post from Healthline has an extremely high Evergreen score:

Overall, we discovered that Evergreen scores were not evenly distributed between different formats. In fact, a list post is 15x more likely to become evergreen than a presentation.

Key Takeaway: List posts and how-to posts appear to be the best content formats for publishers looking to maximize the amount of evergreen content that they publish.

Podcast Episodes Very Rarely Become Evergreen

We found that podcast episodes don’t generally have a very long shelf life.

This may not come as a surprise to folks in the podcast space. There are definitely certain podcast episodes that people listen to years after they’re first released. However, most people’s podcast apps are designed to feature new episodes that were just released.

In fact, the feeds themselves are listed in chronological order. This may partly explain why very few podcast episodes receive social media shares after their first month.

However, due to the fact that podcasts are an increasingly popular content format, we thought it would be helpful to highlight this finding.

Key Takeaway: Podcast episodes tend to create a buzz early on. But very few podcast episodes continue to receive shares and links over the long term.

Content With Engagement on Reddit Has a Strong Likelihood of Becoming Evergreen

Next, we wanted to look at the impact of engagement on different channels on evergreen content.

Among the articles in our data set, content with high engagement on Reddit had a relatively high likelihood of being shared over time.

Why might this be? Like any social platform, Reddit’s users are interested in news items, recently-published content and trending videos. In fact, there are several subreddits dedicated to discovering new content on different topics.

However, unlike other platforms, Reddit also has a fair number of users interested in timeless content including entertainment articles and videos that may have been published years ago.

Key Takeaway: Reddit engagement highly correlates with an article’s chance of generating links and shares over time.

Twitter Shares Don’t Correlate With High Evergreen Scores

We discovered that content with lots of shares and retweets isn’t likely to have high evergreen scores.

To anyone familiar with Twitter, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The platform is largely dedicated to the here and now (in fact, Twitter’s tagline is “Happening now”).

Key Takeaway: Twitter shares have very little correlation with a piece of content’s ability to become evergreen.

Posts With The Current Year In Their Title Are Likely to Become Evergreen

Interestingly, we found that articles that featured the current year in their title had a high chance of becoming evergreen.

Key Takeaway: Including the current year in your title and title tag may help lead to more shares over the short and long term.

Evergreen Content Types Include Best Of Lists, Reports and Studies

To do this, we looked at terms that tended to appear in the titles of highly evergreen content.

Content focused on “the best” tends to have the highest Evergreen scores. This shows that readers highly value content that curates the best products, apps, videos and social media accounts in one place.

Another highly evergreen content type was guides. Like “best” posts, the main value of guides is that they save time.

We also discovered that content containing “data”, “reports”, “study”, “science”, “facts” and “research” in their titles had relatively high evergreen scores.

Content about “the future” and “trends” get shares over time. Key Takeaway: Readers are hungry for content that curates the best, collects information in a single place and includes plenty of data.

Social Media Examiner, HBR and Mindful Regularly Publish Evergreen Content

Among the domains we looked at, Social Media Examiner, HBR, Mindful, Brain Pickings, and Visual Capitalist publish evergreen content at world-class levels.

Key Takeaway: Publishers that put out the highest amount of evergreen content tend to focus on effective content formats, evergreen content types, and topics that people are likely to be interested in years down the road.

Content About Technology, Marketing and Health Has the Highest Overall Evergreen Scores

Overall, content about digital marketing, content marketing, health and entertainment tend to be highly evergreen.
On the other hand, content related to business, finance and fashion is less likely to have high evergreen scores.

Key Takeaway: Verticals publishing the highest rate of evergreen content include marketing, technology, health and entertainment.

Conclusion

That wraps up our analysis. I hope you found the data interesting and useful.