Category: Resources

Many brands are scared of tackling highly technical content in their marketing, even when those topics are completely relative to their audience. It’s not that they can’t write about them. In fact, they are probably the last word in their industry on some of those topics.  They’re simply worried that technical content won’t get noticed or go viral. 

But this just isn’t true. You absolutely can discuss complex topics in a way that makes them highly shareable. It’s just a matter of knowing how to connect meaningfully with your audience. 

Unsure how to get started? Here are seven examples of viral content from brands and publishers who understand how to make complex content shareable. 

The Math Behind Social Distancing [The Visual Capitalist]

Social distancing has become synonymous with the coronavirus pandemic. The theory behind it is straightforward: The fewer people we come into contact with, the less chance the virus has to spread. What’s harder to get our heads around is just how effective this strategy is.

Written by Marcus Lu at the Visual Capitalist, this article and the accompanying infographic do an exceptional job of explaining just how powerful the compounding effect of social distancing are. Lu also explains how the calculations, taken from Signer Laboratory, were used and how they were created. 

It’s the use of visuals that elevates this piece of content. Before the reader even gets to the text, there’s a clear and well-designed infographic that summarizes all of the information. This makes digesting the math below a lot easier — so much so that the article has been passed round and round social media. At the time of writing, Lu’s piece had garnered more than 1,500 shares on Twitter and almost 40,000 on Facebook.

Takeaway: Use graphics to get your message across when words alone won’t cut it. 

Bamboo Transcends the Tropics for Carbon-Negative Construction [Redshift]

We don’t tend to think a lot about building materials. It might be surprising to learn, then, that an article about bamboo construction techniques has been shared more than 140,000 times on Facebook. 

That’s until you read architectural journalist Zach Mortice’s article on Redshift, in which he does a great job of explaining complex architectural techniques in lay terms. He turns a complex topic into a much more alluring one by connecting it with a cause that everyone can get behind: reducing our environmental impact. 

That doesn’t mean Mortice skimps on the details. For those who are as interested in the engineering features as much as the cause, he clearly explains how prototype bamboo milling can help bring bamboo to Western construction practices. There are also several examples of these techniques in action and an outline of what the industry plans to do next.

In other words, Mortice positions the piece brilliantly for maximum exposure, without selling short the people who will get the most value from it. 

Takeaway: Find an angle that connects with a cause to get wider attention, but don’t neglect your core audience.  

The Repo Market, Explained — and Why the Fed Keeps Pumping Hundreds of Billions Into It [Bankrate]

The American repo market isn’t a popular topic of dinner table conversation, yet reporter Sarah Foster’s Bankrate explainer on it has earned 1,000-plus shares since it was published at the end of January 2020. 

Foster does an excellent job of carefully explaining what the repo market is, why it is in the news lately and why it matters to the readers of Bankrate (and, crucially, to their personal finances). The latter part is the key to the article’s success. 

If Foster had just explained the financial instruments behind a current affairs story, this piece wouldn’t have gotten the love it did. It’s because she took a piece of economic esoterica and made it relevant to Bankrate’s readers that it proved so popular. 

Takeaway: When something relevant to your audience is making news, show them how their concerns connect to the bigger picture. 

Machine Learning 101 – Whiteboard Friday [Moz]

Machine learning isn’t an easy topic to explain in conversational terms. In one video, however, Moz’s Britney Muller provides a clear and concise account of what machine learning is and how it works. 

She then gives the Moz audience exactly what they want: step-by-step instructions on how to use machine learning in SEO. These are massive takeaways for viewers and one of the main reasons it has been shared so much (more than 1600 shares at the time of writing). 

The delivery of the content is also fantastic. It helps that Muller is clearly passionate about the subject. But the use of the whiteboard both in the video and in the transcription makes the content especially easy to digest. 

Unlike a lot of blog posts transcribed from videos, this one is just as easy to consume as the video itself. That means readers have a genuine choice. They can choose to watch the video, read the blog post or do both. Either way, they get huge amounts of useful information on a complex topic. 

Takeaway: Video can make complex topics easier to understand.

The History of the URL [Cloudflare]

In March 2020, Cloudflare’s Zack Bloom published a hugely detailed history of the URL that has been shared more than 2,500 times on social media. 

Crucially, Bloom devotes the words needed to do the topic justice. Coming in at more than 6,500 words, it is the longest article in this list. 

If Cloudflare weren’t a specialist blog, such a word count on such a topic might not work. But it’s because the topic-audience alignment is so strong that this article works — and why it has been so widely shared. 

In other words, it doesn’t matter if your topic is complex and your article is long if your audience is interested in it. If you try to condense such conversations, you could be doing yourself and your audiences a disservice. When people are interested in what you have to say, they’re happy to spend a half hour reading your article. If it is worth their time, they’ll spend time sharing it, too. 

Takeaway: Go deep and go long on complex topics to give them the attention they deserve. 

What is the Paycheck Protection Program? [Bench]

If you’re running a U.S. business, the Payment Protection Program is a crucial piece of legislation at the moment. But it’s also not easy to get your head around. Naturally, many business owners turn to their accountants for advice. 

And online bookkeeping service Bench met this demand with one very comprehensive piece of content. The piece’s author, Owen Yin, combined succinct, informed writing with a clear and structured layout to bring clarity to this murky topic. There’s a lot to digest in this piece, so Yin made it easily scannable with a table of contents and bulleted lists to help readers find exactly what they need.

Given that the article was shared almost 4,000 times on Facebook, we think it’s fair to say it was pretty helpful, too. 

Takeaway: Use menus, headings and other formatting features to make longer content as browsable as possible.

How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics [Nautilus]

We end this list by looking at the most complex topic of the lot: quantum physics. 

As authors Sabine Hossenfelder and Tim Palmer note in the introduction, quantum physics is considered “infamously difficult to understand.” Two sentences later, however, the authors have turned that proposition on its head. 

It’s quite easy to understand quantum physics, they argue. It’s just that physicists no longer use the only method that makes sense.

Herein lies the secret to why this 3000-word article has been shared more than 5,500 times on social media. It takes a commonly held belief and dismantles it. Add a touch of intrigue that hooks the reader in, and even the most complex topics become easily readable. 

Takeaway: Hook the reader, then make good on your promise to give them the information they’re looking for.

If you are marketing in a technical industry, you don’t have to avoid complex subjects for your marketing to gain traction. Using any of the seven tactics we’ve explored above, and you’ll be able to successfully tackle your industry’s most complex issues in a way that makes them engaging and share-worthy. 

Images by: Sergey Zolkin, NeONBRAND, NordWood Themes

Scrolling through your Facebook feed, it can feel like there’s no end to the fake news epidemic. A misquoted former president here, a meme refuting climate change there. Often, it seems the only way to stop misinformation from infiltrating your newsfeed is to cull your friends list. 

But that isn’t the case. Behind the scenes, there’s a small world of fact-checkers doing their best to make social media a more factual place — even when it seems Facebook genuinely doesn’t care either way.  

Facebook’s Controversial Stance on Fact-Checking

For those losing track of every PR disaster that Facebook creates for itself, the social media giant has recently decided that it won’t fact-check ads from politicians run on its platform. 

Nick Clegg, former UK deputy prime minister and now Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said in a company blog post that political ads would be treated as newsworthy content that should be seen and heard. 

“We have a responsibility to protect the platform from outside interference, and to make sure that when people pay us for political ads we make it as transparent as possible,” Clegg wrote. “But it is not our role to intervene when politicians speak.” 

In other words, the company won’t fact-check ads from any politicians, even if they violate policies that other users must abide by.

TechCrunch Editor-at-Large Josh Constine argues that Facebook risks giving a voice to politicians who will use the platform to spread lies, without giving users the tools to defend themselves. 

Facebook had already abdicated responsibility by channeling suspected fake news to third-party fact-checkers, Constine writes. “To now say politicians can’t be fact-checked directly at all sets a critical and questionable precedent.”

The only stance Facebook has said it will take is to demote (but not remove) content that has previously been debunked by fact-checkers. 

The social media platform’s stance has caused a backlash among employees, Mike Isaac at The New York Times reports. More than 250 employees have signed an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives that objects to the policy, claiming it’s “a threat to what FB stands for.”

This isn’t the first time Facebook’s fact-checking policies have made headlines, either. In July 2018, for instance, Zuckerberg claimed that the platform wouldn’t take down content that outright denied the Holocaust.

How Social Media Engage Fact-Checkers to Fight Fake News

That’s not to say Facebook doesn’t do any fact-checking at all. Since the 2016 election, Facebook has partnered with around 25 third-party fact-checking organizations to fight the stream of fake news on the platform, Wired’s Sara Harrison writes. Users can flag any content they deem false or misleading. Posts flagged repeatedly are then sent to the third-party partners, who then choose whether to evaluate the content. 

FactCheck.org is one of the third-party organizations that works with Facebook. Facebook sends posts to FactCheck.org’s reporters, who analyze the stories and report their findings on the company’s own website. They also share the information with Facebook. 

As a result, Facebook could identify who peddles misinformation on Facebook and take action against them, says Eugene Kiely, director of FactCheck.org. Facebook has said it will make chronic misinformers’ posts harder to find, meaning fewer clicks and less financial incentive to create fake news. 

That’s not the only way that fact-checkers work to refute false information on social media. Spanish fact-checking organization Maldito Bulo post its fact checks on Instagram in the style of hoax posts. This is for visibility, writes co-founder Clara Jiménez Cruz. “We decided to copy the ‘bad guys’ in order to fight back. We decided to debunk hoaxes in the same format of the hoaxes that had proven so effective at reaching citizens. We decided to try to make the facts as viral as the lies. And it worked.”

As an example, one hoax post that misidentified a woman arrested during the Catalan independence demonstrations was shared 1,200 times on Twitter. The debunked post by Maldito Bulo was shared 8,400 times on Twitter and reached almost 300,000 people on Facebook. 

The Fact-Checking Industry Has Big Concerns About Facebook

Speaking to the Guardian at the end of 2018, former Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski claimed that the social media giant had essentially used them as a PR tool. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”

UK fact-checking agency Full Fact, which signed up as one of Facebook’s third-party partners at the start of 2019, has two big concerns, Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen reports. These are scale and transparency, she writes, and both are complaints that other fact-checkers have levied at Facebook. 

In a report, Full Fact writes that Facebook is focused on expanding its fact-checking program to as many countries and languages as possible without considering how to increase the volume of content or the speed at which is can be fact-checked. Full Fact also says it wants Facebook to share more data with fact-checking organizations “so that we can better evaluate content we are checking and evaluate our impact.”

Some fact-checkers have even been harassed. In Brazil, the abuse aimed at fact-checkers of one third-party organization became so vitriolic that team members had to close all of their personal pages, Melanie Ehrenkranz reports in Gizmodo. 

Other organizations agree that Facebook doesn’t do enough when it comes to fact-checking. Global advocacy group Avaaz have called on Facebook to adopt their Correct the Record initiative. This initiative would mean that any user who had seen false information would be notified, writes Time’s Billy Perrigo.  

“Under the Correct the Record initiative, social media companies would have to make sure that all users who see false information on their feeds are also later presented with fact-checks — whether in the form of a notification telling them something they’ve seen may have been misleading, or a pinned post in their newsfeed with a link to a fact-check by a ‘verified’ organization.” 

Are Fact-Checkers Fighting a Losing Battle?

Fact-checkers themselves are getting pushback, particularly from the Republican right, says David Plazas, opinion and engagement director at the Tennessean. They have been labeled as fake news by those in the Trump administration. “And despite editorial campaigns to the contrary, the label is sticking, in large part, because of the perception that news sites cover the president unfairly.”

For some, rebuking false information simply doesn’t work. That’s according to research by University of Venice computer scientist Walter Quattrociocchi, which looked at five years of Facebook posts, likes and comments from 400-plus public pages. Quattrociocchi found that users who mainly consumed conspiracy-related content tended to only interact with other content that affirmed their worldviews. When they did come across content that debunks these theories, Quattrociocchi found that the conspiracy theorists were more likely to consume conspiracy-related content in the future, not less. 

This means fact-checkers often only serve to further entrench the people committed to the falsehoods being fact-checked.

And when statements or memes are debunked, there’s no guarantee they won’t spread anyway. That’s because false information gets spread across different platforms and translated into different languages before fact-checkers have a chance to quash it, writes Politifact’s Daniel Funke.

For instance, in May 2019 Factcheck.org debunked a Facebook meme claiming that climate change is made up. The fact-checked version outperformed the original by more than 3,000 engagements, writes Funke. But two months later, the same false meme reappeared on Instagram, where it gained 10,000 new likes. 

Furthermore, the fight against fake news is about to get much harder because of deep fakes, warns Aviv Ovadya, chief technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility. It’s now relatively easy to manipulate audio or video to make it seem as though someone is saying or doing something that they never did or said. And there are always armies of social media bots to distribute those deep fakes.

Fact-checkers are fighting a worthy and noble cause. But their battle is hard, long and thankless. Even the platforms that pay them don’t appear willing to help. Unless something significant changes soon, we risk losing the fight for factual information on social media. 

Images by: Agence Olloweb, Glen Carrie, Max Muselmann