L’Oréal’s under the radar site

L’Oréal’s unbranded content hub, plus debates over long versus short-form and content marketing versus native advertising. These were all among the best of this week’s highly shared content, as viewed on BuzzSumo.

L’Oréal content site

Ad Age covered the launch of L’Oréal’s Fab Beauty, a low-key site targeting early adopters in the beauty sector.

The cosmetics firm said the main aim of the site is to secure engagement among trendsetters rather than sales. It stated: “This is about neutrality, experience and craft, not about a product destination – we have other places to do that.”

Arguably, there’s nothing new in creating your own site or platform. Amazon did something similar earlier this month. What is interesting is pulling your own brand out of it.

The story was shared by 1,100 on LinkedIn and more than 300 on Twitter.

Long versus short-form content

For a while now, content marketing and SEO strategists have said the future is in long-form content – principally evergreen. As things stand, Google prefers long even if your readers don’t and anecdotally it does seem to get more shares.

On the other hand, as this piece in Searchenginejournal argues, there’s more benefit to writing two 1,000-word pieces rather than one 3,000-word article.

It received 300 Twitter shares.

Native ads v content marketing

Shouldn’t content and native be considered the same thing? Both are providing editorial-quality content for customers/consumers. Evidently not.

This story asks the same question. Despite coming across as a bit of a how-to, it references some research looking at consumer attitudes. At the end, the answer is obvious. Native or content marketing, it depends on your target market.

This received 200 Twitter shares.

L’Oréal’s under the radar site is part of Content24, the online magazine for London content marketing agency FirstWord.