A great study on what we can learn from Facebook and Twitter article reactions has just been released. 3 months of data was collected – more than 40 million “likes” to 100,000+ articles were analysed.

Here is the summary of the results as I see them. Hopefully these will help you to master the art of Facebook likes on your blog and get an increase in your blog traffic.

Most of the likes and tweets happen within the first 24 hours of an article being published. Less than 20% of total likes happen after the first 24 hours.

In this large pool of data it was measured that there is one click on the like button for every 100 visitors to the article.

It is something that should be kept in mind and you should benchmark your own blog’s performance against it to see if your content / design is working.

The top stories get majority of the attention. One big story gets approximately half of all the user engagement on a certain day. One story per day would capture up to 80% of total engagement!

Not only that but you can also only write one article per week to get 30% of the total engagement.

Think about writing deeper and more researched articles instead of writing a bunch of short pieces. These numbers show that one great blog article is worth much more than several smaller ones.

This study has shown that keywords ‘how‘, ‘why‘, ‘best‘, and ‘future‘ work best when you want to get a viral article. More details on how to write shareable headlines.

The most common type of hit stories is opinion/analysis. This is perfect for bloggers as that is basically what most blogs do.

Always make sure to have your own opinion, your own analysis, your own personality part of the blog article. That is what people want to read.

The topics that are most viral are: lifestyle, photo galleries, interactives, humor and odd news. See more in getting out of the text-is-king box.

According to the study the most viral articles sway and persuade. They are invitations to discussion and interchange.

Try to write articles that scream for reaction, create articles for commentary. Emotions in articles sell and encourage readers to share.

These were some concise and proven tips that can help you master the art of getting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and other social media.

Remember that the most important tip is to stop reading and start writing and implementing these tips. Good luck!