Men sharing content and Betteridge’s Law

Finding ways to reach men with marketing has long been a challenge for the industry; now we know it’s harder to get them to share content, too. Plus we question whether brands have become the media?

Getting men to share

Content marketing agency Apester has published research into how men and women share content. According to the company, the analysis relates to all of the content it has produced – around 250 million monthly views. A lot of this has come from male-targeted publications.

It states unequivocally that men share content less than women. During October, it took a selection of content catering for different groups ranging from strong female orientation through neutral to strong male. Out of the shares, 23 per cent came from men and 40 per cent from women.

So what do men like to share? Shorter articles, debatable topics and news. In terms of subject, sport is the overall winner with around 48 per cent and world affairs a distant second on 22 per cent. Tech follows third on 13 per cent. Men also like interactive content.

The research is geared up to consumers, so it would be interesting to see how it works out from a B2B perspective. This is just a hunch, but the discrepancy between men and women might then level out. In a professional environment it’s based on what you need to know rather than what you like.

Brands becoming the new publishers

First things first. According to Betteridge’s Law, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.

So with that in mind, let’s look at this piece from Forbes, titled The State of Brand Journalism: Are Brands Becoming the Media?”

By brand journalism we’ll assume the author means content marketing.

Essentially, it’s a breakdown of what’s been going on in publishing for a while, who’s doing it and what it means. To be honest, it reveals nothing new, but it’s here if you’re curious.

What is more interesting is the headline. Betteridge’s Law is holding up here, but what if you replaced ‘becoming’ with ‘changing’? Publishing and its display-based model is having a tough time. And arguably a lot of the talent is moving over to content. The end result could be that content marketing is the better journalism.

But is it taking over? Again, Betteridge is holding up fine.

Men sharing content and Betteridge’s Law are themes examined by Content24 – a daily review of content-marketing news from the past 24 hours. For more go here.