You all must be coming up with amazing content and keeping your business pages alive across all the social media platforms that are available to mankind. The question that needs to be addressed here is that are your customers being drawn to you by your content? is it entertaining enough? When do you know that you need to change things around because your audience may be getting bored.
Fret not, Quicksprout is here to your rescue!
Whether you’re a marketer, SEO, or content creator, data is your friend. But don’t worry, I won’t tell you to buy some expensive analytics software. Nearly all the data I cite in this article is free.
Download this cheat sheet to know about 6 ways to determine whether your audience is bored with your content.
Here are telltale signs that your audience finds your content boring.
Your bounce rate is abnormally high
What’s bounce rate?
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e., sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
Basically, someone looks at your site and leaves.
You can find your bounce rate in Google Analytics.
How do you know if your bounce rate is awful or not?
Here are some benchmarks, according to the type of site you have:
Multiple issues can contribute to a high bounce rate.
Slow page load time, ugly web design, annoying pop-ups, or a crappy mobile experience are just a few of these reasons.
For example, mobile bounce rates are typically higher because of the less-than-optimal mobile design of some sites.
However, it can also simply be because readers are less than thrilled with your content and they’re abandoning ship before even making it halfway through.
If your bounce rate is over 70%, there’s probably cause for concern. If it’s over 90%, it’s a serious issue.
When there’s no other discernible reason, lackluster content could very well be the culprit.
You get few comments or no comments at all
Are you creating blog posts, guest posts, social media updates, etc. that are consistently getting little to no reaction?
Maybe you’re even asking open-ended questions at the end and begging for readers to chime in to spark a discussion.
What’s happening?
If nothing, take this as a warning sign.
In my early days of blogging, about ten years ago, I didn’t get many comments on my articles.
This one post (about postcards?!) received only 17 comments and basically no social shares:
I could have gotten all depressed about that.
But instead, I learned a lesson. Maybe my audience gets bored by stuff about postcards.
So, maybe I need to change my game a little bit.
I changed my game, and I really homed in on the topics and style my audience wanted. As it turns out, a post like this got hundreds of comments:
Comment counts are a great thermometer of the interest level of your audience.
If you write a sizzling-hot article on a sizzling-hot topic, the number of comments will reflect it.
But if you write a complete snoozer, no one will comment.
This is the kind of information that tells you exactly what you need to know about your content’s bore score.
Your content isn’t getting socially shared
I personally think that social shares are one of the most simple yet informative metrics in content marketing.
A quick glance at the number of likes, tweets, and other shares a piece of content receives often serves as a basic litmus test to see how favorably (or unfavorably) your audience has responded.
For example, it’s fair to say that if “Blog Post A” received 250 total shares and “Blog Post B” received only 12 total shares, Blog Post A was received by the readers significantly better.
While it wouldn’t be realistic to expect every piece of content to be a home run, a continually low number of social shares often indicates audience boredom.
The readers are simply not captivated by your content and don’t feel it warrants being shared.
The only caveat would be if you’re fairly new to the scene and haven’t really established an audience yet.
But if you used to receive a reasonable number of social shares and those numbers are noticeably dropping, boring content could definitely be the reason.
There’s a simple way to measure how your content is being shared.
You can use a tool such as Buzzsumo. Simply enter the URL of your website or blog, and click “Search!”
You’ll see a screen of results like this:
Granted, you may not have 430k shares on a single post like CNN does. Ideally, though, you’ll see at least a few.
Another free tool you can use is on my blog, NeilPatel.com.
To use this tool, enter your blog’s URL, and click the “Analyze” button.
The report takes just a minute or two to generate—you’ll see a progress bar, telling you where the analysis is at.
When the report is complete, click “Content Marketing.”
The content marketing report shows you the social share counts across your whole website.
Here’s a summary of the social shares on my blog:
The “page shares per network” statistic tells you which individual pages were shared and the number of shares each page received:
You can also see the number of shares each page received according to the social network:
Using this tool allows you to get a very real sense of whether or not your readers are digging your content.
Look, if people are not sharing your content, they probably aren’t too impressed with it.
But let’s be realistic. If your traffic is low, your shares will be low too. No one is going to share your content if no one is seeing it to begin with.
