Why Creating Good and Shareable Content is Good For Your Business

Social media marketing is continuously changing, and as new channels and new demographics come along, new challenges also arise. So, how do you make your content stand out and differentiate yourself from the masses?

Whether you are just getting started or manage an established channel as part of your job, this article will help you improve your social media marketing skills and level up professionally.

So how can you up your social media game and ensure you are making the right decisions?

Truth is it all starts with content.

And even though social media channels have more traffic, visitors and users than ever, the amount of sharing is on a decline.

When sharing information whether it is a post or a blog post or a page, it is important that this content is shareable. So what does that mean?

For a page to be sharable it needs to have the proper social media tags and integration. More than 75% of the links shared online don’t have the proper tags and are shown completely out of context.

So how do we integrate a post with social channels?

• Add Open Graph Tags
• Add Twitter card tags
• Add proper images with proper dimensions

By doing so, your link will show up properly across all channels and medias.

The best way to check if your links are currently showing in a proper manner across channels is using debuggers.

• Facebook Debuggers 
• Twitter Card Validator
• LinkedIn Post Inspector

Now that we know what a shareable post looks like, let’s understand what shareable content is.

Shareable content is content that your audience is excited to share, in other words it is content that is worthy of being shared.

And here is the caveat, there is no magic bullet. What is shareable for a certain group of people might not be for others.

That said, there is a common ground as to what makes a social post more shareable:

• Align with trends
• Learn from competition & stand out
  • Choose your top 10 competitors
  • Look at their content and posts for the past 6 months and see what worked
  • Apply what worked to your channels and business
• Make the content personable and tell a story
• Write to engage. If you think content is bland, it most probably is. As Eminem said, “You got one shot one opportunity, Would you capture it, or just let it slip?”
  • To capture your audience’s attention, you have to trigger their curiosity. So don’t share just for sharing, share with a bit of build up and suspense.
• Be factual and value driven, consumers want value, as Gary V says “Jab, jab, jab, right hook.”
  • What this means is give value, give value, give value and then ask them to sign up to your newsletter or buy your product.
• Diversify, I tell this to my clients. Always diversify posts, never post article only or pictures only or polls only or stats only, always make sure that you are sharing different types of content. It is valuable from both a user experience and technical standpoint
• Test and test. Always try to constantly tweak your content. The more you test the more you know what works and what doesn’t for your audience.
  • I have clients that keep using the same hashtags over and over again, I usually tell them how can you learn what works and what doesn’t if you don’t test?
• Buildup – few weeks ago I wrote an article about what marketers can learn from the movie industry. One of the points that I mentioned was buildup. 
  • Create suspense. 
  • Put a trailer, put a teaser out there. 
  • Launching something new is exciting, so limiting it to only one day is not ideal. The best you can do is divide a launch into a build up phase, a launch page and a post launch phase.

All the points above are practical points that I have seen work and continue to work. That said, this is just on way to maximize on your social media strategy, attend the online workshop where we will cover these other topics.

• The basics of integration and shareable content;
• How to leverage social media automation to get an advantage;
• How to use calendars and strategies to get the best results more efficiently;
• How to use insight and analytics to constantly improve.

Check out the Maximize Your Social Media Strategies online workshop taught by marketing and digital expert Tarek Riman on November 18. 

Register for this free Alumni webinar to have a sneak preview of the workshop on November 4.