We all want people
to share our content
. After all, it’s a type of earned, organic publicity which enables you to reach more people without spending more money. The problem is that there’s no magic bullet and no easy way to guarantee content sharing.
How to get people to share your content then?
Instead, it’s all about testing different approaches and finding out what works. There’s more than one way to get people to share your content. That’s why we’ve listed seven of our favourites approaches, because we usually find that when one of them doesn’t work, another one does.
In fact, the most effective approach is usually to mix and match from this list and to find an approach that works for you. Just be sure to trial one technique at a time and to keep an eye on your analytics. When you get it right, you’ll know.
Here are eight great ways to get people to share your content.
-
Create a great piece of content
Remember that the best way to get people to share your content is to create great content. That said, there are plenty of little tricks that can boost engagement such as visual content, showing photos of real people or including calls-to-action. We’ve shared seven of our best techniques. However, it’s important to remember that what works well for one company won’t necessarily work as well for another.
2. Ask people to share your content
This might be stating the obvious, but one way to get people to share your content on social media is to ask them to do it. Simply adding to your blog post a reminder in the form of a social sharing button can be enough to prompt people to share something. And if the social media sharing buttons aren’t working, you can try other tactics such as pop-ups if people spend a certain amount of time on a single page. Some sites even allow people to share something to a social network in exchange for added functionality or access to new resources.
3. Use a content aggregator
If you decide to use a
content aggregator
, you can start to bring together user-generated content to create photo galleries, video playlists and more. You can then embed those galleries to your website, or even use them in your email marketing campaigns and paid advertising. Take the time to notify everyone whose content you’re using, they’re likely to take some time to check it out. If they like what you’ve done with it, they’ll share the link through their own social networking presence. What a better way to get your content all over the place with some good ol’ word of mouth? That’s why a content aggregator is nowadays a must when to comes to increasing audience engagement.
4. Offer incentives
Offering incentives will give people that little push that they need to go ahead and share something. For example, you could create an affiliate scheme. In this, if people share your content and someone clicks through and makes a purchase, they’re given a small commission or a discount. Done well, it can be the factor that pushes people to click the share button. You just need to make sure that you have a compelling offer that they can’t refuse.
5. Work on your link previews
One of the most effective things you can do if you want to encourage people to share your content is to make sure that it looks beautiful when they try to do it. That means making sure that you’ve spent some time optimising the snippets that you put out to social networking sites and that you’re using visually appealing images as part of the preview. If the shared content looks bad then nobody will click it – if people even decide to share it in the first place.
6. Use gamification
Most of us are already familiar with gamification of some sort or another from the apps and social networking sites that we’re already using. One way to encourage people to share more of your content is to turn to gamification. This can provide them with leaderboards and points systems. Then you can offer rewards and prizes to people if they reach a certain point threshold. You’d be surprised at how motivated to content sharing people can feel when they’re a couple of shares away from a reward.
7. Create roundups
Another great way to encourage your users is to create your content with shares in mind. Roundups are a great way to do this. You can mention a bunch of different people in the hope that they’ll re-share it. Tagging them on social networking sites will also bring their attention to it. Moreover, it makes it easier for them to share or retweet you. As well as being strategic, roundups can also become valuable pieces of content in their own right.
8. Target influencers
Everyone wants to work with influencers because they typically have large audiences in a specific niche. What they don’t realise is that the audience itself can also amplify the message if it’s relevant enough. Let’s say you write a profile piece on a relevant influencer and they share it with their 10,000 Twitter followers. If 1% of their followers retweet it, that’s another 100 shares. And as long as those people each have more than 100 followers themselves, the retweets reach more people than that original post from the influencer.
Conclusion
When it all comes down to it, the best way is to create or curate content worth sharing. After all, people won’t share things out of the goodness of their heart. There has to be something in it for them. Even if it’s just that they can impress or entertain their friends by sharing it.
One option is to use a content aggregator, which will allow you to tap into user-generated content about your brand or industry. A content aggregator can be added to your website to give people a reason to visit it. After all, if they know that their content is being displayed there, they’ll stop by to check it out. They may even want to bask in the recognition.
If you’re using a content aggregator then it also gives people the ultimate reason to share your content. Remember that people are used to sharing things that they’ve created. Using a content aggregator to build a UGC gallery on your website allows them to share
their
content and
your
content at the same time. It’s win/win, and that’s good news for everyone. Good luck.
