Marketing Tip: Create Shareable Content

The Internet is a wonderful place where people from all over the world are constantly sharing content with other people. As a business, you want to join this bandwagon by creating your own shareable content. When you have content that goes viral, it not only increases the visibility of your company and brand, but it can also generate more traffic to your website and increase your search engine optimization.

1. Pull at the heartstrings.

People let their emotions make plenty of their decisions, and if you can create content that makes someone happy—or make them feel anything at all—it will likely be shared. People love stories about cute animals, babies, and the elderly, and if your content can make your audience feel something, it has a better chance of being shared.

2. Be quick to reply with current information.

Your content will get much more recognition if you can produce content quickly at the right time. For example, Oreos got a great deal of publicity during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout by tweeting, “You can still dunk in the dark.” Arby’s got a lot of attention after the 2014 Grammy’s when they tweeted, “Hey @Pharrell, can we have our hat back?” If you can make your content relevant to something that just happened—and do so tastefully—it can have a major impact on the success of your content.

3. Use your sense of humor.

While people love emotional content, they also love funny content. If you can provide content that will make your audience laugh, they will want to share it with everyone else they know. It doesn’t matter if you’re producing a funny video, a funny audio file, or even a funny image, humor will go a long way. Try to create something that you think your audience will find hilarious, and they’ll likely share your content with others to spread the laughter.

4. Post your content in multiple locations.

If you want your content to be shared, you have to put it in places where people can find it. If your website doesn’t get much traffic, that brilliant infographic you created and placed on your site will not have a good chance of going viral, but if you place it on your website, your social media pages, and link to it as a guest blogger, you’ll increase the number of places your audience can find it. This will increase your chances of having the content shared among your audience.

5. Make the content easy to share.

If your audience has to jump through hoops in order to share your content, they will give up. If you want your content to reach the widest possible audience, you have to make it easy to share. If you have a blog, make sure you enable widgets so that your audience can share the content via email or social media with the push of one button. Make sure you also allow your audience to share your audio files, video files, and images with ease too. By making it easy, you’ll increase the number of shares your content receives.

6. Provide transcripts to audio and video files.

Sure, most people are likely to watch a one-minute video than read through the content, but providing a transcription of your multimedia greatly increases your offerings of shareable content. This transcription will allow your multimedia file to gain traction on the search engines, placing it in the hands of people all across the world. Plus, it also makes your content more accessible to individuals with hearing impairments, thus increasing your overall reach and increasing your content’s overall sharability.

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Meyling Lau is a partner at SEOMap.com and has lead enterprise scale SEO programs. Formerly, Mey led a variety of grassroots marketing projects for Hotels.com.

Photo by Saad Faruque