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You’ve likely heard the term Evergreen Content thrown around alot if you’ve spent any time in content or social media marketing.
What is Evergreen Content?
Copyblogger defines evergreen content as:
“These special resources are in-depth examinations of a problem, solution, trend, or topic. They can help your audience find tons of information on a subject that interests them, which adds value to your blog.”
Hubspot describes evergreen content this way:
“Just as the evergreen tree is a symbol of perpetual life, evergreen content marketing uses ideas and techniques that are sustainable and lasting over time.”
These pieces of content can be blog posts, videos, webinars, slideshows, whitepapers, etc.
Anything that you produce that can give value long after it’s been published could be considered evergreen content.
Items that are dated, such as dimensions of Facebook ads or photos, is an example of something that isn’t evergreen content as it tends to change quite often.
The biggest reason I wanted to test this in the Lab was due to some comments Mike Stelzner from Social Media Examiner said on various podcasts over the last year.
“As a matter of fact, I would say it’s so dead that we no longer re-share any of our content on Twitter. We do nothing Evergreen. Everything we post is once and done on social media. On Facebook, we do post a couple of recurring posts, but we have decided that we are no longer doing anything more than just once with social media.”
He’s basing this claim on the fact that only about 2% of the traffic that Social Media Examiner receives likely comes from Twitter.
Stelzner has taken a stance that they will only post a piece of content to Twitter once and then it be bounced around the algorithm until it dies.
Jeff Bullas however tweets out his blog posts every 15 minutes!! And over 560k people follow him so that must be working for him!
Mike Alton makes this suggestion about the frequency of evergreen content:
“If you’re growing your audience, and keeping 4 – 6 weeks in between shares of the same article, it’s likely that each new share will reach more and more new, interested readers. But it’s something to keep an eye on. If you notice that subsequent shares of an article aren’t performing well at all, remove it from the queue or spread your queue out more.”
As you can see there are some differing opinions on the tweeting of evergreen content.
Which sounds like a great reason to test this!
I’m going to test the results of tweeting evergreen content and base my conclusion on Link Clicks. By focusing on Link Clicks we’ll have a real idea if posting these pieces of content over and over is driving traffic and worth the effort.
My hypothesis: Tweeting Evergreen Content is a solid strategy that will produce Link Clicks.
In order to get a 100% pure data set I’m going to do the following on 3 different Twitter accounts that I run:
The reason I decided to tweet the same exact tweets every day was to ensure that this data was 100% evergreen. I prefer to compare apples to apples, not apples to rocks!
There is some risk here that by posting the same tweets every day Twitter might punish me and my results might dwindle throughout the test, but the data will be bulletproof.
The Twitter accounts I used are:
In order to repeat this number of tweets daily I’ll use the Agorapulse app. I’ll explain at the end of the article how easy this was.
Here is a screenshot from the Google Spreadsheet I used to copy and paste the tweets to be used:
Waiting to gather the results was pain staking!!
To get the data I simply went to the Twitter Analytics within my accounts:
Then simply choose the date range and click Export Data to download the .csv file.
Once I downloaded these I put into Google Drive so I could use Google Sheets to add formulas to get the totals below.
After gathering this data here is the results I can report for each of the Twitter accounts tested.
That’s a total of 311 Link Clicks from these 3 accounts over a 5 week period with about 1400 tweets total!
While yes 311 visits to our site isn’t breaking records, for a new site like ours we’ll take every view we can get!
We could stop there and draw a conclusion on tweeting evergreen links but I wanted to dive a bit further into some data.
I looked at the Twitter Analytics for my 3 accounts as well as the Agorapulse account starting from January 1, 2017 through November 30, 2017 (when I’m writing this post). My goal was to gather the complete count of Impressions, Link Clicks, Likes, Retweets and Replies for each account for the 11 months. Along with how many tweets were sent out.
Having this data will help us see an even broader picture of how much traffic you can drive by posting evergreen content to Twitter.
Here’s some data to chew on:
Now before you yell at me I’m aware that not all of these tweets were links to our own content. Some may have been quotes, images, or tweets to other people’s sites.
But, on my 3 accounts I predominately only tweet links to Agorapulse or Social Media Lab content. On the Agorapulse account we primarily tweet our own content as well as other’s links at times.
If we say there is a margin of error of 5% of these tweets not being links to our own sites we can reduce the numbers down the following:
If we isolate the Link Clicks, which we are going to assume after removing the 5% variance are all Agorapulse related links, that’s 3691 clicks to our website in 1 year! All just from repeating our evergreen content on Twitter!
Remember my hypothesis was: Tweeting Evergreen Content is a solid strategy that will produce Link Clicks.
I’m going to conclude that this is 100% true!
Based on these factors:
Any claim that tweeting evergreen content is dead is purely false and a misrepresentation.
Sure if you’re a huge site like Social Media Examiner and getting millions of hits per month and Twitter only equals 2% it doesn’t seem like much. But 2% of 1million is 20,000. That’s alot of eyeballs and potential customers browsing your site per month! I know I wouldn’t turn them away. We also don’t know how many times Social Media Examiner was tweeting the same links to reach this 2%. Was it once? Twice? Twenty??
Have confidence that tweeting evergreen content can and will produce results for you.
I do want to offer a few tips if you’re going to tweet out evergreen content — this is not an exhaustive list but will be helpful.
Trying to manually post your evergreen tweets is impossible — you’d quickly lose track and hate your life if you tried!
Let me show you how to do it easily with Agorapulse.
How easy was that to schedule/queue evergreen content!
What I hope from this experiment is you walked away with 2 things:
While I can’t guarantee you the same sort of results we got as every Twitter following is different, I am confident evergreen content on Twitter is alive and well!
Happy Tweeting!
