Paying attention to what gets shared on social can reveal your evergreen content
You spend an enormous amount of time and effort thinking up content, producing it, and sending it off into the world. But once the initial buzz dies off, what staying power does that content actually have?
Rather than ending up with a growing graveyard of content, some of your older articles can still be relevant and valuable to your audience. That content might be still driving traffic and social engagement, or you may have articles that just need updating to be repurposed for renewed life.
Enter evergreen content.
What Is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is content that can remain useful and relevant to readers for years. It often answers a questions users have or provides them with information.
There are many tactics to take with evergreen content: tutorials and how-tos, origin or historical posts, interviews with thought leaders, and content that includes answers to common questions that your brand is an expert on.
What are the benefits? Evergreen content keeps up a steady stream of traffic to your blog. It’s SEO friendly, and continues to generate social engagement and interest. All of that leads to more brand awareness and conversions for you.
How to Find Your Evergreen Content
You might already have evergreen content. You can find those gems by taking a look at Google Analytics or your content’s analytics platform to find the amount of sessions and page views over time.
Beyond that, it’s vital to measure your social media metrics. What content is continuing to drive comments and shares across social?
Shares are enormously valuable signals for content. Inherently human, social distribution is the biggest game in town in a post-search engine world. It’s a true marker of people’s genuine interest in a piece of content.
We can track that data using NewsWhip Analytics.
This graph shows the Facebook shares engagement for the GE Reports newsroom, spanning from January 1st, 2015, through March 22nd, 2016. We can see the Facebook shares stay steadily higher after a few big spikes in engagement. (Click image for full size)
We can highlight and focus on the time after the spikes to see which content is continuing to drive engagement. Or we can look at the content table for a breakdown of the specific posts.
We can sort the content table by different metrics (click image to view full size), but ideally. We can also look through the table to identify the top performing content trends and themes. What are the keywords that people might be searching for to find these posts?
For GE, content like ‘Relatively Speaking: When Albert Einstein Came To GE’, can continue to drive shares and traffic through the history in the post, and Albert Einstein’s celebrity influence. Their informative ‘science experiment’ posts and interviews with other scientists and engineers can also be evergreen.Â
[fb_pe url=”https://www.facebook.com/GE/videos/967405416661086/” bottom=”30″]
Videos like this, which combine GE’s expertise with truly attention-grabbing science, can remain evergreen for a long time.
Determine if this content will still be interesting to readers a year from now. If there are some things that seem like they might become outdated, consider whether you can update the content to make it timeless, or if you can repurpose it for a new evergreen piece.
Creating Evergreen Content
You can set out to pioneer evergreen content from scratch. You should have a good idea of what content themes see the most success for your brand from analyzing the engagement metrics.
There are many ways to go around this. At NewsWhip, we find that our social media guides and interviews with thought leaders continue to drive traffic and interactions on social media. Â
Evergreen content tends to be longer, and easier to read. This content is often for people who are eager to learn. Our whitepaper, the NewsWhip Guide to Social Distribution, is 65 pages long, but it had hundreds of downloads within the first week of publication.
The Home Depot launched a digital brand newsroom, called Built From Scratch. Much of their content lends itself to being evergreen, with tips on home improvement and maintenance that people can use all year.
A homemade #tinyhouse in the heart of Ohio built by a #HomeDepot dad and his son: https://t.co/IRJXc0JEJ5 #BFS pic.twitter.com/6hB5S8cv8K
— The Home Depot (@HomeDepot) March 14, 2016
While not a guide, this feature on a tiny home shows The Home Depot’s expertise in the homebuilding space and can be used to capitalize on the tiny homes trend for quite some time.
Any evergreen content should still embody your brand’s core themes and message. If you go through the Home Depot’s digital newsroom, you can see their content covers a wide variety of topics, while all staying under their mission of helping people with their home improvement.
Your evergreen content should pass a few questions. Is it useful or interesting to readers? Is it written clearly? Is your tone friendly and accessible?
Most importantly, will anyone care about this content a month from now? How about a year from now?
How to Put Your Evergreen Content to Work
While evergreen content often continues to see traffic on its own, you can augment that traffic. Be sure to distribute it across social media on a regular basis. To keep this process organized, create a list of your evergreen posts that you can refer back to.
A little ?, a little ☕, a lot of ?. https://t.co/rIPaDIzSqL
— Starbucks Coffee (@Starbucks) February 17, 2016
Brands like Starbucks can see continual interest on their evergreen recipe content. The highly visual nature of the posts translates well to social media.
Link to your evergreen content in your other content as well. The advice or information in your evergreen copy will likely be relevant again and again in future posts. Beyond that, the evergreen content can be repurposed for decks, white papers, and other marketing materials.
If you do a series, such as our two-part blog on building brand newsrooms, you could create a drip email campaign to distribute the posts.
NewsWhip Spike gives us a quick view to see if our evergreen content is sustaining momentum over a month’s time.
For WWE, this historical post on John Cena and other wrestling champions’ first-ever photo shoots is seeing sustained engagement despite being posted a month ago. Take a trial of Spike for the stories and trends sustaining engagement around your brand.
Origin and historical posts can stay evergreen for a long time, since history (usually) doesn’t change.
Start Going Evergreen
Evergreen content is a powerful tool, one that most brands can add to their arsenal. It can keep traffic flowing to your brand, be used to deepen your other content, and repurposed into other materials.
If you keep a list of evergreen content, be sure to maintain it. Even the best content can get a little dusty as time goes on.
Quality content is always en vogue and by producing evergreen content that’s already within your brand’s scope of expertise, you’ll develop a steady stream of engagement. This will only help to bolster your brand’s trust and credibility, so start looking at where your content can go evergreen.
