A social media presence is a necessity today, and it’s not enough to just have a presence and post content. It’s important to engage your audience and encourage them to share your content if you want to make an impact in the noisy social media arena.
Sharing average content randomly just won’t cut it. No magic formula exists to make content go viral but following some key principles will help you to create content your social followers will want to share.
Be social and build credibility
It’s called social media for a reason – you need to engage with your followers. If you keep posting without engaging them, they lose interest. Building a relationship comes from consistently relating to them, creating rapport and establishing credibility.
If they don’t trust you, or they believe others won’t trust you, they’re unlikely to share your content. Commenting on or sharing other people’s content is a great way to build up trust and goodwill.
One of the reasons people share online content is that they want to be recognized as being helpful and contributing value to others. You can provide recognition with the simple act of responding to a tweet, liking a post or making a comment.
Choose great visuals
Don’t spend time on a great post and take a few seconds to pick out a generic image. Use animation, video, illustrations, and other visuals to elevate content and bring it to life.
The visual elements help to turn up engagement. It’s not just an opinion that using visuals will get you more followers and shares – it’s guaranteed according to the data.
Create native videos
Don’t just create a link to a YouTube video. Even live video taken with your smartphone and uploaded to social platforms can be very appealing. If videos are short, sweet and entertaining in some way, they’re more likely to be shared.
Use influencers
When influencers share your content, you can reach a much larger audience with less promotional effort.
Creating a relationship that’s mutually beneficial to you and an influencer ensures that your content is not only seen but comes with a director implied recommendation.
If you involve influencers in creating content, they have a vested interest in helping to promote it.
Creating content that gives an influential person free publicity will often result in the post being shared. The person’s publicity team is likely to pick up your mention but let them know about it anyway.
Ditch the sales pitch
Laura McCain, an editor at a firm that provides cheapest writing services, says, ‘’Followers won’t share what doesn’t interest them. They share to connect with others, not to drive traffic to your website.’’
The content must add to their sense of identity. Try to make your posts informational, funny or newsworthy from their perspective. Don’t just create content for your direct audience but for those they are likely to connect with too.
Find topics people care about
See what’s consistently shared on competitor’s blogs and on social media in general. Take note of questions followers are asking and try to address them.
Take notice of what’s trending and try to post as something is happening. Always add a hashtag! People love to share a new angle on a current trend or a new addition to a recent meme.
The debate can bring massive engagement and boost organic reach. Get two people to present opposite sides of an argument on a topic your followers care about and then ask them to give their input.
Create posts with a narrative. Start with a compelling headline that stimulates curiosity and intrigues your audience. Weave anecdotes and examples into content to make it relatable.
Stay simple and focused
Unless your content has a clear purpose, it’s not likely to be shared. Being simple and focused does not mean being shallow. Clarity makes content more shareable than if you try to tackle too much at once and your content is muddled and complicated.
A post must be designed in a way that makes it easy to grasp key points. Think bold subheadings and key points rather than dense paragraphs.
Be authentic
Followers share content when they believe it’s authentic and connect with it emotionally. Humor is one good way to make a connection. Humor isn’t right for every brand, but it does speak to the importance of showing personality. Your audience wants to feel your humanity.
Make it easy to share
Supermarkets know that placing candy and magazines near a check-out line leads to impulse buys. If you want people to share your posts, you need to place social share buttons right where they will find them. If they’re on top or at the side, they’re hard to miss.
Use social media management tools
Last but certainly not least, there’s no point in creating great content if you don’t post consistently and monitor how posts are performing. You need to be able to measure your successes to keep duplicating them.
Dozens of different social media management tools are available today to help you achieve a consistent, effective social media presence. Here are just four of the many tools savvy marketers are using today:
Buffer allows you to automatically schedule all your social media posts and track the success of your marketing campaigns with real-time analytics.
Edgar enables you to automatically share your evergreen content at specific times when your social engagement is at its peak.
Agora Pulse has a variety of useful features, such as social engagement, team collaboration, listening, publishing, and reports.
Crowdfire makes social media recommendations through automated chat messages. You can use it to automate scheduling and publishing.
Conclusion
Growing your social shares does not happen overnight or automatically. To make it happen, you need to be strategic. This involves not only creating the type of content that resonates with your audience but knowing where, how and when to share it so people can connect with it and be motivated enough to share it.
