The Four Ways to Get Others to Share Your Content
How do you get others to consume and share the content you’ve created? Answer that question and you’ve unlocked the secret to social media success. I believe the answer can be simplified into four very basic steps:
- Produce excellent content.
- Package your content well.
- Place your content where your target audience can find it.
- Make it easy for people to share your content.
Most businesses seem to spend too much of their social media efforts on activities that in one way or another go against at least one of the four steps listed above. Let’s take a closer look.
Produce Excellent Content — Too obvious? I used to think so, but have you taken a look at what’s passing for content these days? In order to create excellent content, you need to be able to think like your customers, or your target audience. What information do you have about your products or services that will solve one of their problems? What can you tell them that will make their life easier? Excellent content doesn’t need to be long-winded. It doesn’t have to be expensive to produce. It simply needs to provide value to your audience. Use your imagination — how can you best make your point? Video, audio, photography, or the written word? Use any one of these or a combination to get the job done.
Package Your Content Well — If you’re going to invest the effort to produce excellent content, give some consideration to making it look like it was created by someone who cares. Write thoughtful headlines and captions. Include useful graphics. Maintain consistency in your design elements. At the very least, don’t allow your packaging to take away from the work you invested in Step 1.
Place Content Where Your Target Audience Can Find It — We’re all familiar with the line “If you build it he will come,” (from Field of Dreams, one of my all-time favorite movies), but real life doesn’t always play out like the movies. If you’ve succeeded with the first two steps, you’re on your way, but don’t stop now. Of course you’ll place your content on your own blog or website, but where else can you attract eyeballs? Share it on your Facebook page(s) and profile, make sure it appears on your LinkedIn profile, and post links on Twitter. Consider other social media platforms such as Tumblr and Posterous. If your content is in the form of a video, add it to your YouTube account. You can also increase the size of you audience by posting links on Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg. And don’t overlook the value of your own personal network you’ve been building on each of the social media platforms. There’s nothing wrong with asking a connection to help spread the word from time to time.
Make it Easy For People to Share Your Content — Please don’t throw it all away here. As someone who shares a great deal of OPC (Other People’s Content), I can assure you that if your content is difficult to share, the number of times it gets shared will be adversely affected. Make sure that your posts have a unique URL, so that people can be sent directly to the post — not just the page on which the content resides. Make sure that the content is set up in such a way that when someone shares the URL on Facebook, a relevant headline, description and graphic (if applicable) is generated. You don’t want the headline to say “Home” or “About”, and the description should be specifically about the post it is accompanying — not the mission statement of your company, or some other generic message. Add share buttons to your blog or website, and where possible, send hot links to your content, not just a web address that needs to be cut and pasted. Reinforce the sharing process by appropriately thanking people when they share your content.
Chris S. Cornell is the Director of Social Media at Thompson & Bender — a Westchester-based PR, advertising and marketing firm. He manages several online communities, and consults, speaks and writes about social media. You can follow Chris on Twitter.
Adam has worked in the local news industry for the past two decades in Westchester County and the broader Hudson Valley. Read more from Adam’s author bio here.