How to get your content shared

As marketers we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into producing content. Not to mention resource, talent and budget.

And yet we often fail to do those small things that will ensure our content is shared as widely as possible and enjoy a long shelf life.

In a recent blog we looked at how repurposing content can give it a second (third, fourth, fifth…) chance.

Here we want to look at how you can extend the reach and life of your content in the way that you ask your internal teams to share it.

Let’s first look at how things are – and then at how things could be.

How things are

Your new content goes live.

Those managing your marketing channels will schedule posts and emails.
Your sales team will share it with their networks.
Other stakeholders will do the same.

And so, over a few days, your content will be shared a few times, each time using the same headline, the same image and the same essential message.

If you’re lucky some may have added a personal take on the content to give it some stand-out, but most will have shared the link with a cursory ‘Interesting read’.

This short-lived, monotonous repetitive flurry doesn’t help your content gain traction – it just helps it become part of the social wallpaper for a day or two.

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How things could be

It doesn’t have to be like this.

Taking some simple steps will ensure your content gets noticed and lives longer.

Here is how you can ensure your content has multiple chances of being seen, lives on beyond that initial flurry of shares, gets presented from different angles and shared using a variety of images.

What your content needs is ‘a sharing toolkit’.

And this is what you should place inside it:

Perspectives

Don’t expect your teams to create their own ‘takes’ or ‘perspectives’ to use when sharing your content. Provide them with three or four that can be used for multiple posts about the same content.

Visuals

Include arresting visuals of pertinent stats, powerful quotes, perceptive observations and pause-worthy images.

Sharing these will help present your content from a number of angles and ensure a range of arresting images are used to deliver engagement.

Immediacy

Alongside these visuals also include some text-only posts that capture the main takeaways, opinions or findings from your content.

These make creating a personal post as easy as cutting and pasting.

Such text-only posts on networks like LinkedIn actually have an incredibly high engagement rate. They look immediate and personal – rather than polished and corporate – and many networks will prefer to hear from a person rather than a marketing department.

Longevity

You have now enabled multiple ways for your content to be shared. This means that from just one piece of content, you have provided everyone with weeks of possible entry points for engagement.

Send regular reminders over the next few weeks that your content is fine to be shared and suggest different ways of using the toolkit to do this.

Small things – big wins

We were shown this simple sharing toolkit hack by our friends over at Your Allies – you can read about it in more detail here.

Over the last 12-months, Your Allies has taken over 200 sales people and marketers through their LinkedIn & Social Selling Accelerator.

It’s through exposure to all of these teams that these missed opportunities to share content were highlighted. The outcomes of making content easy to share (and share again) far outweighs the time needed to enable it.

What is holding you back?