Content marketing is continually changing, requiring more shareable content to work harder for your campaigns. We need to create shareable content that evolves with the trends and tastes of people’s online behaviour. Even in a few short years, we have witnessed changes in the type of shareable content people prefer and what they distribute.
Surprisingly for us, while researching this post, we found infographics are no longer the king of sharable content. So what is?
In this post, we will highlight the top shareable content tips for your blog. If you’ve enjoyed this post, give it a share on social media!
Your Blog Content
Many people are focused on getting their content to go viral. As exciting and profitable it would be, it’s not that easy to do. Even expert marketers using all the best psychology tricks don’t go viral every time they post. While it can be possible, there’s a whole armada of serious work that goes behind viral posts. It requires a receptive audience, a mix of excellent content, and expert content promotion skills.
Understanding your audience, how to promote your content, and what makes people share posts is vital. That’s why focusing on a long-term content strategy, that grows your readers organically is critical.
So Why Look at Shareable Content?
Your job as a content creator is to make valuable and informative content.
If you can get influencers in your industry to share your content, you’re onto a winner. People trust people, and if someone is genuinely sharing your content because they think it’s useful for their audience, then people will gravitate towards becoming your readers. Getting enough shares on your content will increase your followers and your referral traffic, these permanent links will boost your domain authority and potentially rank higher in Google searches.
What Makes Shareable Content Work Better?
UCLA researchers found that there is a psychological urge to want to share content.
The component of the brain that likes to share ideas always correlates to the same three types of content that fulfil one or more of the following functions:
1. Utility:
Think of ‘life hacks’. Content that is helpful and useful lights up the shareable part of our brains. If we see something that will make our life easier, then we have an urge to tell our friends so they can use it too.
2. Entertainment:
Think of YouTube. The most popular channels are gaming channels, closely followed by music. People love to be entertained, and if you’ve seen something funny or entertaining, we bet you’ve shared it to someone with similar interests.
3. Inspiration:
People like to share content that has inspired them or could inspire someone else. It’s content that people can relate to, which reminds them of a friend or loved one and feel the urge to share.
Coschedule found that people share content due to these following reasons:
4. To Bring Value to Others:
People do this to change someone’s opinions or to encourage action.
5. To Define Ourselves to Others:
A staggering 68% of people share content as a way to express who they are and what they care about publically.
6. To Grow and Nourish Relationships:
Up to 78% of people share content to stay connected with people that they may have lost relationships with.
7. For Self-Fulfilment:
69% of people share content to help them feel more involved to that around them.
8. To Support Causes or Brands:
84% of people share content to support causes or issues that mean something to them.
What is Shareable Content?
Here’s how you can write your posts to make them more shareable:
1. List Posts: (Or Listicles as you may have heard.)
List posts are taking over the top shareable content becoming the most shared. Backlinko found that listicles have an average of 218% more shares than “how to” posts and surprisingly 203% more than infographics.
2. Longer Headings:
We also learned from the Backlinko study that headings between 14 and 17 words are shared more. It sounds crazy to us too, but the theories behind why this is the case, do make sense. It could be due to getting in more keywords, or the fact that there is more information making people want to read more we don’t know. But the proof is in the pudding.
3. Use Images in Your Post:
People are more likely to share content with images. Tweets and other social postings with pictures are 94% more likely to get shared.
4. Practical and Useful Content:
Create content that people can educate us. Whether it’s educational or instructional, people want more.
5. Longer Posts:
Posts above 1000 words are preferred. Longer posts are undoubtedly beneficial for Googles algorithm too. But focus your post on quality rather than quantity. An article that rambles for the sake of 2,000 words will lose readers.
6. Positive Posts:
People prefer to share happy and positive content. Negative posts don’t do as well as positive. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that after tracking the virality of almost 7000 articles from the New York Times over, the more positive the NYT article was rated, the more it was shared.
7. Use Short Paragraphs:
Your audience really will skim through your post, so you want to make it as simple as possible for them to pick out the main parts. If they conclude that your post has value, they will share it.
As we said earlier, sharing the content isn’t enough. You’ve also got to follow through with a plan and strategy to maximise your share potential.
Shareable Content Tactics
To get your content more likely to be shared, you need to do the following:
1. When to Publish:
Find out the best day to publish your content. Unfortunately, this will only work with your industry, and you can only really figure it out with trial and error. Set different times to post in the day and days of the week too. It will take time, but be worth the trouble in the end to maximise your sharing potential. We send the email also based on time zone through Hubspot. Our audience is international and therefore scheduling a post to be sent at 9 am in the local time means better-controlled delivery.
2. Find Out Where Your Audience is:
For B2B companies; Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in are the most popular social media platforms to use.
18-24-year-olds use social media for their news and information, while only 40% of over 45-year-olds do.
For more social media demographics see the link to Neil Patel’s post where he goes into more detail here.
3. Social Share Buttons:
Where you place your social share buttons is essential. There is a delicate balance between making it easy for your readers to share, and also getting on their nerves. You also don’t want to make them too hard to find, as they will give up and not share!
Scroll with Page: Scroll with page shares are the best form of social sharing to use. It’s easy for the reader to find and acts as a reminder to share.
Pop-ups: If you must use a pop-up, only use it once on your website. It’s annoying for a new pop-up to appear every time you click on a new page.
Bottom of Page: This is a great reminder for someone to share once they finish your post.
Top of Page: Social sharing at the top of the post is a natural place for the reader to find, but once they finish the article, they may not scroll back to the top to share.
4. Customised Quote Boxes for Social Sharing:
It’s a great idea to already set a personalised quote for Twitter so that users can share more quickly and don’t need to alter or add the text to tweet.
The fewer work people have to do to share your content the better. WordPress has a great article on the best social sharing plugins to use here.
5. Ask People to Share:
It sounds too simple. But Neil Patel found that when a Tweet contained the request “please retweet” it received 50% more shares!
6. Ask To Share in Your Mailing List:
If you’ve got your mailing list set up, then this is the easy part. Just ask your readers to take the time to share the post. It’s that simple.
Do you need help on how to set up a mailing list? Check out our past post “Improve Blog SEO and Social Content Reach”
7. Interact and Engage on Social Media:
No-one likes to follow profiles that only talk about themselves. The best types of social media profiles are the ones who interact, share and engage with others. So make sure you are sharing different content from other sources as well as your own.
Conclusion
Those are just a few ways to build shareable content to get people distributing from your blog. There are dozens of tricks of content creation, content promotion and audience engagement that we haven’t mentioned here.
We’ve covered a few ways to get your content shared. There are so many more ways you can create and promote your content that encourages social sharing.
If you’ve got some ideas you’d like to share let us know in the comments below; we’d love to hear your tips and tricks.
Oh, and please share this article through your networks! Thank you