By the time you bump into this post you may have read tons of advice on getting your content shared (In Content Marketing Ideas), that just don’t seem to work.
Do we try to find the answer for how to craft your content for sharing?
There are hundreds of social media marketing experts out in the web, who think it’s their sacred responsibility to update their blogs every week to come up with new “tips & tricks” and give wise advice for their readers. Although these advice doesn’t even work for them!
In this article, I’d like to focus on a few fundamental things. You may have heard of them before, but they all have one common value: they work.
Make sure you take these 5 steps while crafting and marketing your content and you will be impressed by the number of shares in different social media networks.
That is our main goal. Everything else is just fluff.
Content Marketing Plan : 5 Steps To Craft Your Content For More Share
What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Before you start crafting your amazing content, go “outside” and find out, what topics tend to be shared. There is a smart tool by Ahrefs called Content Explorer.
With this tool can see a number of shares the relevant content got into different social networks. Just type in the keywords and key phrases, related to what you are going to write, and play with some variations.
Thousands of shares will let you know that you are on a right track.
And in no way, I’m questioning your ability to come up with an awesome idea. I just don’t think one can come up with ideas of a kind over and over again.
Just don’t descend to stealing. This can be penalized by Google and simply damage your image. Stealing sucks.
Get your content visualized
Visual and visual-rich content is favored by everyone. The average internet user is like a kid: hating text plumps and loving the images.
This probably dates back to our childhood where we loved pictures in our schoolbooks and thought that text was boring.
Reading takes a lot of mental work. Such effort may be perfectly justifiable while reading a novel and sipping iced tea in the backyard.
But it is much easier to consume any text information, reinforced by visuals. Appropriate images require less processing because they fit with the message.
There is enough information on the web, showing the importance of visual part of your content.
I would like to show you a perfect self-explaining infographic,created by Leo Gomez.
Another benefit of images is that they can easily become a powerful source of content shares as well. Keep on reading to learn how.
Put your share buttons in a right place
Let’s assume you have a cool blog post. It is smart, exciting, informative and helpful.
It has some photos, images, a video, and all the cool stuff. What will be the regular way for your readers to share it? The clicking of the share buttons below the post or on its side.
Co-schedule recommends placing your social share buttons on top or on the left of your content body.
My personal opinion is that placing your share buttons on top only works if you already have an extremely popular blog and a bunch of your visitors share your posts even without reading them.
So I’d say it is good to have your buttons “floating” on the left side.
If you’re using WordPress to power your sites, you can use a Buffer plugin. Although there are quite a few other tools.
Add more ways to share your content
Why limiting your share possibilities with share buttons only?
Your visitors may be willing to share some pieces of your content, not the whole post. So give your visitors more ways to share your content!
This can be elegantly managed by adding share buttons to your visuals and making the notable bites of your text tweetable.
There are some tools which just come in handy. WordPress sShareaholic plugin is perfect for powering your images to go to Pinterest.
Moving forward, you can plant some sound bites or tweetable quotes in your text. Check out how Michael Hyatt uses eye-catchy and easily tweetable quote boxes in one of his latest posts:
You can search this particular quote on Twitter and see that it has been shared many times.
And every tweet of a kind has a link to Michael’s post, bringing, even more, visitors, traffic, and shares.
Tweetable quotes can be easily created in WordPress with TweetDis plugin.
It has a number of quote box templates, including the ones with author’s image.
A powerful way to use tweetable is to use quotes by influencers in your field or by celebrities.
They will be eagerly Tweeted by your readers. You can make your own sound bites tweetable as well.
Ask and you shall receive!
Do you want people to share your content?
Then ask them to do it!
Yesterday a 4-year old neighbor kid came up to me and confidently asked for 2 bucks.
And when I asked him “What for?”, he said that he wanted to buy an ice-cream. He wanted ice-cream – he did not have money – so he just asked.
So why not to ask your readers to share your content?
Maybe your call-to-action is the only thing missing to push your readers to share?
Look at these Twitter stats, revealed from by Dan Zarrella, when he was working with HubSpot.
They show the increase of Retweets, resulted from using a simple call-to-action.
Be dare enough to ask. In fact, isn’t your content worth sharing?
Conclusion
If you take these five simple steps, while crafting your content, you will help your content get shared more regularly and widely on social media.
Keep in mind that growing your social network accounts and sharing your content is good.
But it is much more important to get your content shared by others.
Sure thing, there are many other vital points, affecting the number of your content shares in all various social media networks, like:
- Writing magnetic headlines
- Proper formatting
- Appealing to your readers’ feelings
- Creating truly useful content
These 5 steps I wrote about may not seem that obviously strong, but they really work. Let them serve you well!
I hope you found this post useful. Is there anything you don’t agree with? Or maybe you’ve got something to add? The comments are all yours!
And don’t forget to share this post with your friends!