Yes you are right!

1) I am wondering if the length of content affects shares, which can also affect links. For example, notice how widely the Humans of New York posts get shared, and they are usually very thin content. They also use visuals, always, and I wonder if that plays a part in here that hasn’t been calculated. And another thing is – where does the content get posted in its ‘original’ format. Humans of New York posts on Tumblr and Facebook – both of which are social sites encouraging social shares.

2) What would happen if ‘funny’ and ‘entertaining’ met ‘evergreen’ and ‘business-ey’ – like this post summarizing Matt Cutts videos into actual answers: http://www.theshortcutts.com/

3) With the above two in mind, I guess content types (i.e. photo, video, gifs, writing etc.) also should be considered, not just the type of site?

4) Some of the big news sites syndicate articles from around the web as a “you may also be interested in” section. If an article appears on those side-bar and bottom-of-the-article posts, that would inevitably result in more shares and links. But do those count as shares, or as links?

Getting shares as a raw number is relatively meaningless if the content isn’t strong enough to persuade creators to reference and link to it in their own content. This is also the intrinsic reason why shares happen vastly faster than links.

Shares are low friction events, they fall within the 9% of the 90-9-1 participation inequality principle. So you get a lot of them. Links on the other hand are high friction events and fall into the 1% bucket.

Shares get you in the game, the content is the difference between a 3 and out and a touchdown.

I’m surprised by the LinkedIn stats. I’m leaning towards @trappermark:disqus on this one. The publishing platform is still young and users are still unfamiliar with the medium.

It feels weird to deep link into a social network. The (linking) user has a lot of questions…Will someone have to be logged in to read this? What about all these weird parameters that appear in the URL? etc. etc.

I speculate that as Google starts indexing more LinkedIn articles and we start discovering them organically, we will also see an increase in linking behavior.

As far as why LinkedIn posts get few links even when heavily shared…my speculation would be that people outside LI don’t view LinkedIn Publisher posts as real content. I’m betting they see them as social media posts, even though their longer form.

I’ve seen the same thing on Google+, where you can right a longform, very authoritative piece, that gets lots of shares, but very few sites will link to it.