Zero-click content (Green Marketing)

Amanda Natividad, vice president of marketing for audience research startup SparkToro, tweeted recently: “It’s a tough world out there for creators. … Over half of Google searches end without a click. And social media platforms ding you for linking out. What to do? Beat the platforms at their own game. Make Zero-click content.”
Intrigued, I read the rest of that Twitter thread and then took a deep dive into what exactly zero-click content is and if it actually works.
Here is what I learned.
Zero-click content is posting on social media with no link included. For example, I would normally share on Facebook that I have a great pesto recipe and include the link to that recipe on my blog. In zero-click content, I’d instead just post that I have a great recipe and include the whole thing in the Facebook post.
What is the point of that you might well be asking? Isn’t the whole endgame of social media to drive clicks and visits to your website? Well, yes — and no.
Natividad argues that zero-click content does not require anyone to leave the platform they are on making it easily consumable to the reader/viewer and saving them time. It is considered to be “native content.”
Further, it means giving the best information upfront.
That then drives up your engagement numbers to the social media platform’s so the algorithm rewards your post with a higher rank.
The payout is then that you get higher numbers of readers of your posts and that they will then decide on their own to see what else you have on your website or blog for them to read.
Natividad admits that this shift in strategy is very scary for marketers.
“Freely giving away value with no hope of tracking ROI goes against everything we were taught as marketers,” she writes. She urges marketers to have faith that these posts with zero-click content are building your following and boosting your brand, even if you cannot directly measure clicks back to your site.
She explains, “When you create content so valuable that it doesn’t need to be consumed off-platform… It becomes even more likely that your audience will like, remember and trust you enough to eventually smash that call to action.”
Here is a little secret, you can go back later and add a link.
After you create a piece of zero-click content that starts to get good engagement, you can go back to it and add a CTA and a click. Wait for the Facebook or LinkedIn algorithm to rank your post over a few days, then go back and add that CTA with a link into a post update or in a comment below your post.
By the way, this method applies to all social media platforms except for Pinterest, where the embedded link back to your content is the whole point of creating a pin.
(Editor’s note: Kathy Jentz is the editor/publisher of Washington Gardener Magazine, the publication for Mid-Atlantic home gardeners. She can be reached at KathyJentz@gmail.com.)