For a quick burst of traffic, the ever popular list posts do quite well (e.g "7 reasons you should never do X", usually tied in with a current trend). They do well on social media sites, but they attract a certain type of visitor that is looking for a diversion so they don't stick around for very long.
Current event and news posts also die off quite quickly.
Long term traffic usually comes from more helpful articles, such as "how to" or "why does" style articles. Not so great with social media, but can get decent search traffic for a long time if you pick something a lot of people have trouble with.
Looking at my stats, I have articles from 2007 that still attract decent activity, and they're nearly all "how to" style tutorials. Other posts that do well have downloads (such as cheat sheets). Least popular are my "welcome to my new blog" post and a couple of "what's going on at the moment" style posts.
As a general rule, when I write a tutorial I try to pick something that will still be useful in 5 - 10 year (depending on the subject - tech has a much shorter lifespan). These tend to be much more useful and generate more comments and search traffic than less focused posts.
Hope that helps.