Why content is about quality over quantity

76% of B2B companies say they are going to create more content over the next year. MeetTheBoss TV’s Ben Thompson asks: are we headed for content overload?

A few content-based stats for you: 350 million photos a day are being posted to Facebook. 130,000 articles a week are being written on LinkedIn. Over 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s an awful lot of words and pictures fighting for our increasingly fractured attention.  

And the problem is only getting worse. A recent study shows that 76% of B2B companies say they are going to create more content over the next year, and more than half of B2B marketers are allocating more budget towards this type of marketing in 2016.

In fact, there’s a very real danger of content-overload. According to a recent report from SocialChorus, 83% of millennials believe sponsored stories make their social media experience worse.

So perhaps we don’t just need more content. Maybe we need better content.

Marketing guru Joe Pulizzi puts it succinctly: “There is no more room in the world for content that doesn’t add value to its intended audience in some way,” he says. “Most content is, in a word, horrible.” But he does go on to say that there is always room for “amazing information that gets people thinking, feeling, acting differently.”  And perhaps this is where we need to focus our collective content creation efforts: on telling stories that resonate, that strike a chord, that compel people to act.

In the rush to reach the top of search engine results pages and drive more traffic to their pages, marketers sometimes forget that the content itself has to be worth it. It’s not just a numbers game. Quality counts.

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