AIming to Be an Archive

“Whereas the Big Five often let their older books fall out of print based on sales histories, some university publishers… think like a library, aiming to be an archive for authors’ books that remain in perpetuity,” Aaron Gilbreath advises in Poets & Writers magazine.

So what about online content? Does the Internet “think like a library”?
“The internet is often called a digital footprint that we leave behind us,” Mia Naumoska writes in internxt.com. Yet websites and social media platforms are constantly updating their algorithms, she cautions, resulting in some content being removed or even lost. Platforms may remove posts that violate community guidelines or terms of service, she adds. In general, though, blogs and articles posted on websites have a much longer lifespan than social media posts, because they are typically optimized for search engines and can be found through search queries for months or even years after publication.

An infographic by Content Hacker illustrates the comparative lifespans of different forms of content posting, ranging from TikTok’s few minutes to Facebook’s five hours, to YouTube’s thirty+ days to blogs, whose lifespan extends for years.

Evergreen content
It’s not only the platform on which content is posted, but the nature of the content itself that is a determinant of longevity, the Digital Marketing Institute explains. Evergreen content is not time-sensitive and can continue to drive traffic long after it is published. Instructional and informational pieces, for example, lend themselves to remaining relevant over long periods of time.

LinkedIn articles vs. LinkedIn posts
Posts on LinkedIn are short messages that can contain text, images, videos, links, and hashtags. On the other hand, LinkedIn articles are longer-form pieces of content, with more in-depth discussions, analysis, and storytelling, with a dedicated “Articles” space within your profile.

“Feature” blog posts
Feature posts are non time-sensitive, and in fact, the goal is to have the material be “evergreen”. (When someone searches for information on a topic, it’s quite possible for them to “matched up” with content written a long time ago.) Good informational content, after all, can have relevance even months and years later after it was first published!

At Say It For You, we’ve learned over the years, blogs and newsletters can balance feature stories with “news”. While we want content to “stick around”, readers need to know about new products and services they can now obtain, new partners or employees we want to introduce, and our recent or upcoming activities in the community.

At the same time, content marketers need to “think like a library”, providing long term value to readers and “aiming to be an archive”.