ByEvergreen content vs topical content: Which type of content should you focus on?
There will always be a debate when it comes to choosing Evergreen Content Vs Topical Content, as both types provide many benefits to social media marketing. Topical content is great to get instant exposure there and then about a specific news piece, but evergreen content has been known to provide value for both old and new readers. What is the difference between these 2 types of content and why does it matter when it comes to social media marketing?
What is Topical Content?
The best way of describing topical content is by saying it’s more of a news topic about something that’s happened recently. It’s the content you’ll see getting shared around Facebook for a few days until there’s updated news to be shared. It gives marketers instant exposure, but when users read it three months down the line it’s useless.
An example is all the discussion around the Fyre Festival. There’s a lot of buzz around this topic right now and content on the topic is clouding social media feeds. Websites can’t stop writing about it. But in a few weeks, it will die down. Look at what happened to the Unicorn Frappuccino. All media outlets were frequently writing about it, Buzzfeed even did a taste test. But now there’s hardly any news about it.
What is Evergreen Content?
Evergreen content is described as content that is much more informative and beneficial to the reader. If you look in the Search Engines for help on a specific topic such as decorating, you’ll often find articles like this one The 10 Most Important Tips For Decorating On A Tight Budget.
That is an evergreen article that is going to provide benefits to users not only today but also one year down the line and beyond. As the article is extremely helpful, it will gather backlinks over time. This will help not just the article, but the entire website rank well on search engines. They also get a good number of shares as people like sharing helpful content. These include both instant and long term shares.
Topical Content Is Great for Instant Success
When you look at latest news posts on the likes of Facebook and Twitter, you’ll see that it is instantly as popular as something that’s been around for weeks, and that is the main benefit of topical content when it comes to marketing. A lot of marketers love topical content marketing because of this, but others prefer evergreen content because they know it’s going to be of value to readers for months, if not years.
An example of a site that constantly posts topical content is Viralnova. Sites like these prowl the web for trending content and then create their version of it with a social media optimized headline and publish it. They get the temporary instant traffic from all the social media shares. But their long-term traffic from these posts is extremely low.
Social Media Profiles and Blogs Will Carry on Growing Thanks to Evergreen Content
You should remember that it’s not the content on Facebook and Twitter that’s going to be seen daily, it’s the content that’s posted on blogs and websites that are hosted by the best web hosting providers because of the search engine results. This evergreen content essentially ends up getting shared three months down the line on Facebook. Not many people want to read topical posts that are news about something that’s happened three years ago, but they wouldn’t mind reading something that is still informative three years down the line, which evergreen content will likely achieve.
The great bonus of creating evergreen content is that it not only gets seen months later by people that haven’t taken advantage of the information yet but it’s going to carry on repeating itself thanks to new people sharing the content and linking to the posts.
In conclusion, you could market social media profiles by taking advantage of either type of content and realistically you’re still going to produce the same results. However, when it comes to evergreen content, you can easily market it in a way that gives you instant exposure as well as still being informative a year later, which is why it could be the content of the future for social media marketers.
Who do you think wins the discussion behind Evergreen Content Vs Topical Content? Which type of content do you use in your social media marketing? Please leave your comments below.
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About Steve Conway
Steve Conway is a content marketing professional and inbound marketing expert. Previously, Steve worked as a marketing manager for a tech software start-up. He is passionate about discovering new software that will that will advance his already well-honed digital marketing techniques.
