Naked Nuns and Social Media

Does social media need good content to make it popular? The short answer is “no.”

While keywords continue to have great value in SEO results, there’s nothing quite like naked nuns and other obvious human factors to drive views, clicks and shares.

But popularity doesn’t necessarily mean success when it comes to marketing.

Allow us to explain:

Why naked nuns?

At the Orange County Register, a major daily newspaper, prior to the current owners taking over, the reporters were judged strictly on how many clicks they could get on their stories on the newspaper’s website.

Soon, the reporters realized that if they used the word “naked” in their headline, they had fantastic results.

The word “nun” also achieved a good rating.

The powerhouse, of course, was when one of the reporters was able to use the phrase “Naked Nuns” in his headline. His clicks were never higher.

The common denominator?

The lesson to learn is that the common denominator can drive social media attention.

If you post something that tons of people click on, Google responds positively and ranks it higher, which allows more people to see it, which increases the number of clicks. And voila — naked nuns go viral.

Sex and religion are still both extremely popular topics.

As are kittens, with 6,660,000 views on a single YouTube video.

Or dogs on skateboards, which had 21,705,000 clicks on one video.

And these aren’t really even good versions of cute cat videos or dog on skateboard videos. We’ve all seen much better content, even on those topics.

Sometimes, the lowest common denominator is just that. The lowest.

And typically, it doesn’t result in the “right” attention for your content.

So, how does a marketer attract the right attention?

Instead of using the lowest common denominator, smart marketers can focus on content and keywords that relate to correctly marketing their product or service – and leave common out of it!

Remember that if you’re selling financial services, you won’t attract prospective wealthy clients with naked nuns. You’ll simply attract bored people who are surfing the internet.

So next time you’re trying to figure out how to reach your specific audience through social media, forget about counting worthless “likes,” and instead focus on content that will win you a dozen perfect prospects.