Social media shares have the ability to create a tremendous impact on the success of content marketing efforts. Therefore, it is extremely important for you to learn how to create content, which would get shared on social media.

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Here is a list of 5 useful tips that you can keep in mind in order to create content, which can help you get shares on social media.

Know your audience

This might be basic, but it’s necessary. Know who you are creating content for and why they will want to share it. If you want someone to share your content it needs to speak directly to their pain point, an emotion, entertain them, etc.

Analyze your own content and see if it does any of the following:

  • Does your content solve a problem for your audience?
  • Does it pull on an emotion?
  • Does it entertain your target audience?

One of my most shared blog posts is ‘15 Important Tips for Creating a New Website for Business‘ which was shared over 400 times.

content shared on social media

I believe it was shared because of a few different things:

  • The article aligned with my overall theme of giving quick tips to improve your online presence
  • I gave away 15 tips that you could easily implement on your own
  • I shared my post on my social media networks so my own audience could read
    • When I shared on Pinterest, I created a custom graphic for it
    • When I shared on Twitter, I used an image to accompany the text
    • I added to StumbleUpon for more views
  • I gave examples of tools to use for your own business website
  • The article got picked up by Quuu promote which is an amazing service that shares your articles for more views
  • I made it easy to share on my website by adding the Social Warfare plugin

Offer something useful

Before writing the content, you need to think whether your content is going to be useful for targeted audiences.

Take your time to do research about an issue faced by your audience. Then you can write an article highlighting solutions that your readers can use to get rid of that problem. Your audience would find such an article useful and tend to share with their friends and family members on social media. If you offer a product or a service, you can also highlight how it can assist your audience to solve their issue.

This great blog post by NATT Safety Services focuses on teaching people about the Working at Heights training in Sudbury with a complete guide, offering helpful tips and useful information. This is something their readers would find really valuable.

If you know that your community who you are trying to reach enjoys watching videos or listening to audio versus reading a blog post, make sure to offer that type of media to them.

Doing a creative and fun giveaway that helps someone with a problem would not only be useful for them but would add a level of ‘shareability’ to your content.

Make it visual

Text-only content will rarely be shared on social media. People won’t read lengthy and boring articles, which is why it’s useful to create high-impact visuals and videos to engage your audience and make your content more share-worthy.

sharing on social media with visuals

Bigstock has amazing images you can buy for a monthly price.

You can easily locate websites that offer royalty free stock images. You can add them to your content to make it more interesting. Turning typical ‘boring’ information into infographics helps transform ‘unshareable’ content into interesting graphics that people will be more inclined to share.

Easy sharing options

Have you ever read a great article and want to share, only to find it’s almost impossible? I have, and guess what happened? Nothing. If you make it hard for people to share your blog posts, chances are, they won’t go out of their way to do so.

If someone reads a great piece of content on your site or blog, make it easy for them to share with their own audience. The reader doesn’t want to waste time copying the link and pasting it into social media; it’s just too much work for something so simple. Using easy and effective tools like SumoMe or Social Warfare

This simple addition will quickly lead to a great increase in shares.

Hit an emotion

If your content is powerful enough to awaken happiness, sadness, hope or any other emotion, readers would be tempted to go ahead and share it. As a mom, anytime I see a funny post about getting my kids ready in the morning or see a touching post about being a mom, I tend to share it.

Chatbooks has one of the funniest videos I’ve seen in a long time and not only did I watch the video multiple times, but I shared it, downloaded their app, and told various friends about their product.

 

The Chatbooks video has been viewed over 12 million times. They know their audience, know the pain point of their audience, and hit on the emotion of them. Success.

Do you have any tips for creating great content that gets shared? I would love to hear your ideas below!