Creating Shareable Content

Introduction

Is it entertaining, informative, or newsworthy? What catches your attention enough to stop you from scrolling through your news feed? We’ve accumulated 5 tips for how to create content that not only informs but excites your audience and pushes them to comment, like, and share with others.

1. Keep Your Audience in Mind

Who do you intend to reach when posting your content? Whether that’s seasoned customers or new users, consider what your audience finds interesting and post about it. Social media is all about the “social” aspect so emphasize your readers/followers first.

2. Add Value

There are 3 types of content that marketers use for adding value across social platforms.

Educational: Educational content strives to inform users of products or services you offer and their various features. Share a blog article or infographic to get your message across and be sure to link relevant forums, blogs, or articles to provide trusted and valuable information.

Inspirational: Inspirational content is what you see most often when you’re being sold to. This type of content’s goal is to inspire you to do something, much like a CTA (Call to Action) does. Inspire your followers to read your latest blog post, download your app, or sign up for your webinar by posting testimonials or videos of real people utilizing your products and services.

Entertaining: Entertaining content is what the majority of social media users consume today. Entertain your audience by posting gifs, memes, or other trendy content to your feed. Keep your audience in mind as you explore topics of interest and even consider sharing some of their content if it fits your messaging. Lastly, be mindful of balancing the 3 types of content specified here to boost your overall user engagement.

3. Incorporate Graphics

The most highly shared content online is that of videos and images. Major platforms like Facebook actually prefer video content and tend to show it more frequently to users as opposed to text based posts.

To further improve your social media presence, we suggest paying attention to your image sizing. Images with low resolution tend to be blurry and can’t scale up. The ideal images sizes can vary from platform to platform but you can easily find that information by doing a quick search or visiting this article by Karin Olefson (https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-image-sizes-guide/). This is a small but often forgotten step that you can easily take advantage of to improve your graphics.

4. Consistency in Branding/Voice

At a brief glance, your website and social media pages should be easily recognizable as the same business. Using brand colors, logos, and voice to maintain branding across your social media is important for creating shareable content. Depending on your industry and audience, your business’s voice and use of technical jargon may vary to best fit your targeted readers.

5. Investing in the Right Tools

You don’t need to spend a lot to get started creating shareable content. Not having in-house videographers and graphic designers shouldn’t stop you from using the thousands of free services to take charge of your digital content. Here are a few favorite services among marketers:

Canva – Use pre-made templates combined with your own images, text, and  more to create beautiful social media content.

EzGIF – Turn your videos into gifs then edit and crop to your liking.

WordPress or Blogger – Host your blog online with these tools or ask your web provider if they have a similar option.

Youtube/Wistia/Vimeo – Host videos on your own channel.

Bitly –  URL shortener used to incorporate more visually pleasing links.

Google Trends – Stay up to date on trends with data driven insights.

Hemingway – A writing tool that critiques your message to improve its readability.

Review

Content that’s unique to your brand is a powerful resource to engage, inform, and convert potential customers. At its foundation social media is about being social and by incorporating these 5 tips, you can establish higher user and post engagement.