Last week, Hubspot's Dan Zarrella (@danzarrella) held a webinar called The Science of Blogging based on his research into blogger and blog reader habits. It was a great seminar with some eye-opening points, and if you didn't get a chance to check it out, here are some of the main takeaways.
- Analysis of 170,000+ blog posts show that links about videos get more hits than photo links.
- However, photo links get more comments than video links.
- Incentivizing commenting by the audience tends to work, because the word "giveaway" gets by far the most comments.
- Something to keep in mind when sharing blog posts on Facebook: As the reading level required for a Facebook post goes up, the chance it gets shared goes down significantly.
- Most blog views and links happen early in the week, but blog comments and retweets happen later in the week.
- Blog articles posted around 10am tend to get the most amount of views.
- Most re-tweets happen between 2pm and 5pm.
With the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, obviously bloggers have to keep the best practices in mind if they are going to set themselves apart from the rest.