Sharing and Content Marketing

Written by: Gary Horsman

Your Shareable Content

You spend time creating your content but do you help to make your content shareable? Delightful and shareable content is valuable to you and valuable to the people who are exposed to it – after all it is delightful! Your content needs to connect with your audience to be shared. When shared it spreads the word about you, your business and your content.

Whether a tweet, a blog post a video or a status update, everyone wants their content to engage with their audience. For organizations and professionals, that engagement has important and practical value.

Here are some points to consider to help you get your content shared.

1. Connect with Emotion

If you know the emotional triggers of your audience and can build this into your social media content then this is helpful from a sharing perspective. What is your audience concerned about? What are their desires? What problems do they have? Concerns, desires and problems often are connected with powerful emotions. What text, photo or graphic content or video can you use to help you connect with emotion?

Here is a video done by Infiniti. It defines a problem in simple terms – backing up (we all do it) – the problem we have with backing up – and then shows some examples of how they have a solution. They bring in emotion but it is subtle. The ending to the two specific situations is a happy ending. The video is a “feel good” video.

2. Engage by Focusing on your Audience

Relate your content to your audience. Do not put you, your product or service in the center of your content. Put your audience in the center and then craft content that connects with your audience by helping them understand how what you do or what you offer relates to them. This aspect of content creation with the objective to help your audience means you have to know your audience well.

Put yourself in their place and create content that engages and defines the benefits to them. I am a member of Business Networking International (BNI) and in our training there is a clear emphasis on knowing your ideal client and fully understanding your audience. This is necessary for any business. It is also necessary for you to understand your audience if you want them to share your content.

Here is a video about Wahl Beard Trimmers. As you watch this you will see that they made this video about the beards and the beard owners. I think it is well done and note that I am sharing it. I am helping their marketing efforts (for free!).

Full Disclosure: I own two Wahl Beard Trimmers – one for each puppy.

3. Bond Using Stories

I have found that popular (i.e. shareable) online content is based on storytelling. People love stories and a good story can help to tell a bigger story about how your organization, product or service helps your audience. Storytelling can help to give your organization a unique personality and this helps to differentiate your organization.

Can you tell a success story about someone that your target audience can relate to? Can you tell a story about how your service helped someone just like your ideal client? Put the example of the ideal client and how they were successful at the center of your story.

4. Contribute to Community

If your content makes a contribution to a community in a delightful way then this community is more likely to share it. I am a member of Rotary International. If I write a post that supports the activities or thinking of this specific community then it is more likely to be shared. It is much more likely to be shared than if I try to get this community to share information about my services.

If you can be genuine and helpful to a community and provide some valuable insights about the value of your service or provide some insight that helps your audience then you are making a positive contribution and supporting your business.

5. Align with a Situation

If you know your audience well and know of a specific situation that already has the attention of your audience then create delightful content that leverages this situation. Do this in a way to, again, be helpful to the audience. Provide your insights. Suggest a solution. Provide some entertainment based on the situation. Tell a story that relates to the situation.

If your audience is already engaged in a specific situation and you tap into this properly then this will help support the sharing of your delightful content.

Here is a link to a Prezi (a presentation) on more thoughts about social media marketing. If you create delightful content then the next step is to get people to share it. Please feel free to share this post with people you feel will benefit.