How to Create Highly Shareable Content

Author: Kaitlyn Wilcoxson Category: Branding, Marketing, Social Media & Digital Date: August 17, 2018

It’s happened to the best of us—you spend all this time trying to craft the “perfect post” for your social media account. You’ve spent what feels like hours researching, writing, proofreading, publishing and promoting a post that ends up feeling like a huge failure with no likes, no comments and absolutely no shares. The truth is, creating highly shareable content isn’t always easy, and it can be discouraging to put an ample amount of effort into something and see subpar results. This definitely isn’t a feeling you want to keep occurring, and it’s surely not something you want to keep struggling with. Luckily for you, there is a way to stay focused on creating new and shareable content. The answer lies in the five fundamental reasons why people want to share your content on social media. Once you know these reasons, they’re going to be hard to forget.

Brand Advocacy

Ask yourself this: are you more likely to share content from a brand you like or dislike? Of course, you are going to share content from brands you like. This is your first tip—develop a plan to retain brand advocacy. In other words, people will share your content because they are fans of your brand.

Follow these steps to retain brand advocacy:

1. Be proactive—Put yourself out there, make time to interact with people and engage with your clients and prospects FIRST. Comment on other accounts posts first and get recognized.
2. Be consistent—Brand advocates will share content without even fully reading it if they know what to expect from you. Keeping good style and great quality content others love will boost your reputation over time.
3. Have a mission—very few people can connect with someone who is just out to make money. Which values and goals can your audience get behind?
4. Put yourself out there—It’s hard to be a “fan” of someone or something you don’t really know. Tell your story, let your audience in and remain humble and professional.

Emotion

People are naturally emotional and one’s emotions can drive a lot of decisions, even in the social media world. By tapping into people’s emotions, we can unlock the power to move more people into action. By showing your audience how much effort and meaning your posts have, your audience can sympathize with you on a different level than if you were to post straightforward, generic content.

The more extreme your emotion, the more it can move people. For example, something that mildly amuses you is not going to get the same share as something that you cannot stop laughing over. Put simply, if you want more shares, tap into charged emotions.

Appearance

Who doesn’t want to look good in front of their peers? When it comes to sharing content, brands want to share content that helps portray how they want to be seen. Our job as marketers is to create content that makes our audience look good by sharing.

Look at your target market to determine the type of content they would want to be seen sharing. Is your audience composed of individuals who want to look more “in the know” and knowledgeable? If so, you could benefit from posting “how-to” or breaking news articles so the sharers feel like they are keeping up with current trends.

Causes and Beliefs

By aligning your brand with something your audience is passionate and cares about, your shares are sure to increase. Success in this aspect of marketing lies in developing the right strategy and executing it in an organic, authentic way to which everyone mutually benefits from being involved. By looking into the causes that are important to your audience and posting about them, readers can feel more connected to your content and are more likely to press the share button.

High Value

I know what you’re thinking—I already know this. Who wouldn’t want to share a post with high value? Well, hang on a minute. How much time are we really spending on creating this “value?” By doing a lot of research, creating images, editing and proof-reading countless times and, possibly even incorporating videos, the value of a post can skyrocket. If you are only spending 30 minutes to an hour on your content, its no wonder shares can be non-existent. The bottom line here is simply this—go the extra mile. Put more effort into making your content better overall and produce as much value per post as you possibly can.

With these five fundamentals in place, your content should produce more shares, while getting your message across to a higher volume of audiences.

For more information on how to make better, more shareable content, contact Paradigm Marketing and Design to schedule a consultation.