How to Increase the Sharing of Your Posts

As self-proclaimed ‘social media gurus’ sometimes we have to ask ourselves the hard burning questions and come up with some answers. This week I’ve decided to focus on: What content do people share and why?

People share content because:

1. It is an expression of their self-identity
   1. Makes them look cool, relevant, timely, smart, etc.
2. Act of generosity/kindness
   1. This is the #1 reason why people share content
   2. To help others gain useful information
   3. People want to help and inform their peers/audience
3. A symbol of love and support
   1. Some social sharing of content has nothing to do with the content; rather it has to do with who wrote the content
      1. Sharing a post because it’s your brother’s fundraising efforts, mother’s blog, sister’s small business, etc.

Overall, people share content on social platforms for intrinsic, emotional reasons; whereas companies are typically sharing for economic reasons (to boost sales). There is a quote, “you can trick people into clicking, but you can’t trick them into sharing.” This is what we call a bait-click. You can write an amazing headline that has nothing to do with the actual content you are writing about and get clicks, but you’re not guaranteed to get shares.

In order to increase your content’s ‘shareability’ you must build a ‘heroic’ brand; a brand that transcends even its own content. You can do this by:

1. Congruency
   1. Be you. Understand the brand messaging and transcend that into a social media persona.
2. Consistency & Work Ethic
3. Service to Others
   1. Show how your brand serves to help and inform others - this leads to trust.

It is important to note that a large audience or a large number of followers/fans does not equal action on their behalf. An ‘alpha audience’ is the portion of your followers that have an emotional connection to your brand. Part of our job is to find that alpha audience, find who is sharing our content and see who they’re connected with and following, in order to grow our own alpha audience. Remember when it comes to traffic and the sharing of content, hope is a lousy strategy and building trust is key.

Note: These findings were based on a collection of notes I took at the Social Media Marketing World Conference 2015