Here’s What Goes Into a Highly Shareable List Post

Published on March 4, 2016

List-based blog posts – also called “listicles” (seriously) – are some of most important pieces of content your blog can produce.

Listicles aren’t just easy and fun for your audience to read; they get shared more on social media and yield higher organic traffic through search while also triggering more engagement, lower bounce rates, and more conversions than any other type of blog post.

But how can you tell if you’re making the most of your lists? The good people at Siege Media recently put together an extremely compelling infographic on what works for listicles.

Here are a few of the most fascinating takeaways you need to know:

Headlines

Let’s start at the top! When titling your list, keep in mind that your keyword should be pluralized, the better to match up with your prospective searcher’s needs. Though your headline can be on the longer side, be sure to keep your URL brief – short URLs are 2.5 times more likely to get clicks, according to Marketing Sherpa – and make sure your keyword is in the URL, which significantly helps with SEO.

And here’s an interesting quirk to keep in mind for your next list post: Listicles with numbers in their headlines generate 36% more clicks. Makes sense. Even more interesting? Listicles with odd numbers in their headlines generated 20% more clicks than those with even numbers. On your next post, keep this in mind: 5 apples that look like Chicago Cubs pitchers may actually be more compelling to your reader – and get your site more views – than 6.

Images

If you’re going to include a large number of images, make sure they’re as appealing as possible; high quality images get 121% more shares, according to Siege.

And make sure your photos are consistently formatted and don’t take an extremely long time to load. Users are 23% less likely to return to your brand after a subpar user experience, and awkward images can negatively impact your readers’ ability to quickly scan through your list.

Readability

While we’re on the subject of scanning, studies show that most readers are going to breeze through your posts quickly. The more accessible and easily-scannable your structure, the more enjoyable users will find your content.

The same holds true for your written copy: The more concise your text, the better. Concise text can improve readability 58% over non-concise writing. Keep it short, keep it clean.

Social Sharing

One of the benefits of listicles is their enormous popularity on social media (the Buzzfeed empire was basically built on their backs, after all). But there are steps you can take to prime the pump for maximum sharing.

First, be sure to embed floating share buttons; these easy fixtures have been shown to increase social traffic by nearly 30%.

Your top image is also important for generating shares. Research from our good friends at Buffer have shown that pinned images (the visual content attached to social posts – usually pulled from the header image of your post) – perform better when they feature overlaid text. In fact, pins featuring text received 300% more engagement than those without.

Ready to start producing high-quality list posts of your very own? Whether you’re looking to generate content or improve your brand’s presence on social media, Geek is here to help! Drop us a line to help kick-start your content marketing strategy today!