Does your social media content fall on deaf-ears?

Your content may be fantastic, but if it isn’t shared socially what is its purpose? No matter how amazing your tweets may be, if there are no followers, the tweet is lost. After all the aim of social media marketing is to promote your products, services or business as a whole so if no-one sees it, the content and key messages are lost.

Content marketing is an essential tool in modern marketing practice and is used to persuade and influence the customer. However if nobody sees the content, whether on your website, a social media site or via twitter, it will not have the opportunity to influence anyone.

Consider the 90/9/1 rule of content marketing in which content is created by 1% shared by 9% and read by 90%. This means that in order for your content to reach a large audience it is essential that the 9% of people who may choose to share it are stimulated and motivated enough to do so.

Here are some ideas for improving the “shareability” of your website:

Create appealing content

There are several websites (e.g. Topsy, Socialbakers) which can analyse and measure social media in order to monitor the effectiveness of the content. Knowing what appeals most to your viewers will enable you to adjust the content accordingly in order to maximise the benefit achieved from it.

Allow your website to share

Having social media share points on your website, either at the side of bottom of your landing page and blog posts make it easy for viewers to share the content.

Viewer engagement

Whilst social media is sometimes seen as an opportunity to broadcast messages it is also a two way tool and ideal for viewer engagement.  As everyone knows, having a chat with a friend is far more interesting (usually!) then simply talking to one-self, and social media is not an exception.  Encouraging viewers to interact with your content can not only create more interesting content, but will also promote brand allegiance and assist SEO.

The use of Tweetable content

Creating content which can be tweeted is a great way of making maximum use of your content. ClickToTweet is a tool in which a pre-populated tweet can be created for your viewers. ClickToTweet is easy to use. To send a tweet to your audience, simply sign up to ClickToTweet, enter your tweet, create a link and then place the link in the blog post.

Suggestions of items to tweet are quotes, tips or a thought-provoking question.

Embed content into Tweets

This is very similar to using ClickToTweet in that the viewer is provided with the tweet with minimal effort on their part.

In order to do this:

1. Click “more” on the tweet you wish to embed
2. Click “”Embed Tweet”
3. Copy the code generated and paste it into the blog post

 Share with email marketing

Of course, email marketing in itself is a way of distributing content, why not also incorporate ClickToTweet or social media share buttons into your newsletters? Not doing so would be missing an opportunity to share.

Ask to be shared

Whilst it is not always considered polite to ask, in this case the direct approach works. If you have great content or a stimulating blog, why not simply ask people to share it? Yes, it’s as simple as that. Seeing a prompt or call to action to share has been found to be extremely effective in promoting sharing through social media (providing of course that social media share buttons are clearly visible.

Whatever you decide to do, sharing content is not hard to do. The key to success is providing great content in a format which allows viewers to share it with minimal effort.