Shareable content helps you gain explosive traffic, and with a load of content already on social media, getting people to your website is a big thing. When marketers compute for content marketing’s success rate, they include “shares” as a vital determinant. Why? Well, like engagements and likes, shares offer invaluable benefits to brands. Shares increase exposure and benefit your SEO ranking. It makes you visible to other people’s networks and widens your reach. Shares help you cast a wide net over to prospects who aren’t aware of your services.
Additionally, studies are quick to point out that people in social media are likely to share content not because they trust you, but because they trust the “sharer”. This makes every “share” a vital part of community building, and communities are needed in order to grow loyalty among customers.
Make sure you’re on track to creating shareable content. Here are 5 strategies for creating shareable content that your users will not be able to resist!
- Doing a competitive or periphery industry research
- Affirming your audience’s values & speaking to their emotions
- Creating content that is useful to your audience
- Exploring what’s trending
- Including “share buttons” where people can see it
And finally, an addition (more of a content type) that we think will be a good source of traffic: Having a sit-down with industry experts or influencers.
Now without further ado, let’s dig in!
Doing a competitive or periphery industry research
A competitive analysis gives you an idea about your competitors’ and the industry’s behaviour. It helps you see how your initiatives look compared with others. It’s a type of social media listening or “benchmarking” that familiarises you with industry movement and helps you up your content marketing game. Furthermore, competitive research is a great way to see how your audience (and the audience you still want to connect with) are reacting to or connecting with other brands within your industry. You can do this by analysing others’ “viral” content. Viral content is something that received the most traction in terms of likes, engagements, and most importantly shares.
Affirming your audience’s values & speaking to their emotions
Content that affirms your audience’s opinions on something is likely to be shared, this is because users value the validation of their beliefs—especially if said validation comes from a reliable source. Craft your messaging by picking at something that you believe is relevant to your audience. This idea must also align with your own brand values. Analysis of your own data will help you plan for that content, especially if you keep an eye out for things your audience has reacted positively about in the past.
The same goes for speaking to your audience’s emotions. There’s a new maxim for the digital era: social media engagement is prompted by a content’s ability to elicit emotional responses from the audience. It could be joy or indignation. It could be a surprise. A whole spectrum of emotions. A study on content virality says that “content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral” than those that evoke low-arousal or “deactivating” emotions. Owing to this reason, you need to know what your audience cares about. What their primary concerns are, motivations, triggers, source of joy, and even pain. Understand this in order to create a shareable content that is compelling and has depth.
Creating content that is useful to your audience
When The New York Times’ published a study on The Psychology of Sharing*, they surmised that users take an active stance when it comes to sharing content online: 90% assess the content for usefulness before deeming it worthy to be shared. Usefulness is usually measured in a content’s relevance vis-a-vis the audience’s pressing concerns. Take holiday lists, for example, like a practical Christmas gift guide published by Glovida last year to aid shoppers in making the right gift choices. Or timely lists like the one we published about the latest Instagram updates for 2019. Content that addresses the audience’s practical, pressing needs and is useful is highly shareable. Think how-to’s, checklists, or online resources like white papers and case studies.
Users also utilise social media in order to solve a pressing concern or issue. The audience is looking to gain insight into their everyday questions. They are likely to deem the content (and the brand) that provides them with answers as useful. After this, sharing is the next probable step. Whatever content type (image, video, blog, etc.) you deem it best to present your data in, it must be relevant and useful to your audience so it inspires them to share.
*said study has since been taken down from the website
Exploring what’s trending
Trending content is trending because it’s timely, relevant, and shared by many. Think of the internet as a vast source of information for marketable content ideas. So, creating content based on hot, trending topics is a great way to stay relevant and interesting to users.
Quick searches on the internet can help you find what’s “making the waves” at a given time. For example: for fun and engaging content, you can craft your content based on a marketing gem “fun holidays” calendar. Take Starbucks India for example. This coffee chain giant celebrated the International Coffee Week 2018 with “Brewtober”, a weeklong appreciation for coffee beans that provided experiential activities to their patrons. This campaign eked out shareable content that was highly distributed and shared on social media by the participants themselves!
Including “share buttons” where people can see it
This one’s pretty obvious. Of course, all of these wouldn’t make sense if you don’t provide users with an option to share your content! This is where share buttons come in. It’s your duty as a creator not only to create content that is relevant, trending, or interesting for users. You have a further duty to make sure that users could share your content in a manner most convenient for them. In blogs for instance, when you bury the share buttons on a secluded portion, it’ll be almost impossible to get them to use it.
Remember, add these share buttons where it’ll be most visible to users. For instance, Social Media Examiner put a dynamic share panel on the right side of their screens which follows users as they scroll down a certain blog post, making it really impossible to dismiss it.
There’s also a lot of social sharing plugins you can incorporate to your blog content and explore, so go ahead and check that out!
Additional point or “content type” to explore: Having a sit-down with industry experts or influencers
More a type than a guide, this point effectively ensures that content gets distributed not only by you. Interviewing or collaborating with industry experts helps establish you as an important thought-leader in a field. I’ll mention a point I’ve said earlier; people are likely to share content shared by people they trust, and experts already have that loyal following. Influencer or expert interviews are likely to be shared by these influencers, and their shares can link people back to your website, opening others to your services and products.
LadyBoss Asia does this a lot. Their latest interview covered Supernova founders and twin entrepreneurs Emily and Sarah Hamilton and has been shared by loyal followers on Facebook!
LadyBoss Interview with Supernova Founders Emily and Sarah Hamilton
Conclusion
Our list can help you create compelling and shareable content for social media. However, remember that timing is a big factor you have to keep in mind when publishing your content. If you want to drive traffic to your website and increase your exposure, then you must these five things: know how to look at your competition, validate your audience’s values and pique their emotions, become useful to them, explore trending topics, and finally include share buttons that are easily accessed by your audience.
The expertise of the Amber Creative team helps you expand your reach and gain visibility for your brand. Interested? Reach out now!
