Content Marketing Success: 3 Tips for Creating Highly Shareable Content

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The number one way to use content marketing to build your business and brand using the tool of content marketing is to create content that your audience wants to share.

Sounds obvious, right?  But the fact is, there are still a number of “content marketers” (more like information spammers) who spend more time on trying to learn how to apply SEO tactics to an article than they do trying to create content that is worthy of their own audience’s time (much less worthy of their audience’s connections’ time).

Seth Godin has talked about this in his blog (hey, if I’m going to name drop, might as well make it good).  But if I knew of a better example of it from another blog, I’d use it.  He was talking about it relative to Twitter, and how list size isn’t as important as share-worthy content when it comes to content going viral.

here’s his premise in a nutshell. If you have a gigantic list and mediocre content, your content might go wide in initial distribution, but it’s likely to die out quickly because it’s not valuable (interesting, informative, poignant or funny) enough to share.

On the other hand – if you have a smaller list and incredible content that has your readers clicking the share button before they’re even all the way through reading it, your content actually will have longer legs than if you spent more time growing your list but producing content that isn’t as good.

So how do you create highly shareable content?

Content Marketing Gold: How to Create Highly Shareable Content

1. Listen

There’s an old saying that the good Lord gave us one mouth and 2 ears as a suggestion that we’d be a lot happier if we listened twice as much as we talk.  In content marketing, listening is one of the most important skills for creating content your audience is likely to share for the simple reason that it allows you to find out what they’re interested in!  I’ve talked about this before, but don’t assume you know what your audience wants! Instead, use social media to listen strategically to find out what it is your audience wants and then provide it (well written and delivered, of course).

2. Use Analytics

Take time to discover when your content has the most impact.  Experiment using analytics programs to find out what time your audience is more likely to read and share your material (and it might be different for content marketing delivered via blog versus Twitter).

3. Where Is Your Audience?

Not every business has an audience in the same place on social media.  Know where your audience prefers to read and share content and focus your efforts on that particular network. Is your audience more likely to repin than to retweet?  Make sure to include a highly re-pinnable picture (with your URL included) with every blog post, and make sure to pin it to Pinterest.  Are your followers on LinkedIn?  Be sure to include posts in this network as part of your content marketing strategy.

How do you create highly shareable content? I’d love to hear – leave a comment below.

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