I don’t know about you, but I have an incredibly short attention span. Well, actually, I do know about you – I read about 1/16th of those articles about human attention spans, until I got bored and watched Conan’s rendition of Oprah’s secret plan for world domination. Oh, Conan! Now there’s a man who knows how to share his content. This week, Rand helps the rest of us figure out how to do the same: create content that’s not only interesting, but is easy to read and share. We all love sharing interesting, funny, and topical content (look at me, of all people – I’m sending people to videos of Oprah!), so why not play to that instinct by making your articles, images and pages as easy to share as possible? Rand explains how below!
For a long time, SEOs have been playing a game of putting together content that has the maximum virality. They can be shared across the Web and earn links. We’ve also been playing that game very well in the social sphere. You could see SEOs were early adopters of social technologies, particularly in the social sharing spaces like Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and StumbleUpon and those types of places. Now that’s evolved a lot on Twitter and Facebook as well. The interesting thing about this, of course, is that there are some particular things that you can do to tweak and tune and make your content more shareable. That’s exactly what we’re talking about today. Let’s walk through some of these techniques.
First off, content structure and formatting. Similar to when you’re crafting link bait kinds of things, you want to make sure that the content that you’re attempting to make shareable, that you want that audience to help get out there for you, is easy to consume and universally accessible. This one’s very important. What I mean here is that a lot of people are going to be on mobile devices when they’re using Twitter and Facebook, Twitter in particular but Facebook a lot too. For that reason, you’ll get a lot of likes, shares, retweets — retweets are very big — via mobile. That means that that accessibility factor becomes critically important. If you have content that doesn’t download fast on mobile, 3G and 4G networks are still not that fast, this could really impair the ability of that content to perform as well as it might otherwise. Certainly if people can’t see it on all those devices, or I’m making stuff only for Chrome and it’s not as accessible for Internet Explorer and that kind of stuff, again that’s going to frustrate some folks as well.
I know this is a little bit western-centric, but because of the language usage particularly by powerful people on Twitter and Facebook, people who have big accounts who can share lots of this stuff and the retweet or reshare ability, you want to have at least, if not originally written in English which is certainly fine, an English version. If you can do that, particularly if you’re producing content in other languages, it can be really helpful because it can mean that there’s an extra virality from the English language speaking countries, which really dominate at least the Twittersphere today. Facebook is a little more international.
Single page versus multi-page, this is fairly important. When you see a lot of those articles that are on big news sites and they’re split into multiple pages, sometimes you will see it perform well, but oftentimes you’ll see the print version or the single-page version do well. That’s why I really recommend having at least those options. If your CMS or content management system forces you to split it into multiple pages, at least make sure there’s that single page option for the social sharing types of people. Make it relatively prominent. That might even be the one you want to seed into the social sharing community so people get that content. Your advertising manager is going to be like, “No, no, no. I want the one with the maximum ad clicks because it really matters.” But if you care about SEO, rankings, the maximum number of people sharing it, being branded with it, and those kinds of things, bringing new people to the site, this is the way you’re going to want to go. For that reason, you also want to do minimal advertising when possible.
In addition to this content structure formatting stuff, the content that you write, the stuff that you attempt to make valuable and visible in these social sharing platforms can perform particularly well if it’s topically relevant and timely. I mean two things here. By topically relevant, I mean relevant to what you do. There’s this system that’s been going on, almost a meme that’s been going around the Web of people, particularly in the SEO field or in the social media marketing field, attempting to put link bait kinds of articles or types of content that has nothing to do with their business, nothing to do with their audience on their websites and just trying to share it to gain this authority or branding. You can see that those really don’t perform well. They didn’t perform well in Digg or Reddit, and now they’re starting to get frustrated users on Twitter who won’t share them and Facebook as well. There’s that disconnect between, “Wait, why does this exist on this domain?” If people are asking that question or if you think people might be asking that question, probably not topically relevant.
Timely meaning that it has something to do with events that are current. We see that a lot of stuff that gets shared socially has to do with an ongoing conversation in your niche, in the broader social sphere, or in the broader news of the world or the country. Having that timely relevance can help your content spread a lot farther and wider than it would if it were produced six months after the event, after the hubbub has died down around it.
The thing that everyone is talking about now, and I’ve got pics of that thing, new data about that thing, charts and graphics and this kind of stuff helps a lot. If you’re trying to figure out what those hot things are right now, there are a lot of sources that aggregate this type of information. Popurls is a good one because they sort of put everything together from all these places. The news site, Bitly News, which is essentially like a Hacker News clone, but it shows you the things that are most clicked on through Bit.ly links, all types of Bit.ly links, which is huge. It gives you a sense of what’s being active on Twitter right now. Twittersphere is similar. You can read things like the New York Times Most Read and Most E-mailed list and a lot of other papers do that. Obviously Reddit, Techmeme, and Memeorandum aggregrate technology and celebrity news. There are tons of these.
If you read these on a regular basis, every day for a few weeks, once a week for a few months, you’ll get a really good sense for what kind of content is timely and relevant and gets shared. Without that, I think you’re going to really miss out. You can feel that from people who are in the social space, the SEO space, and they try to put this stuff up but they don’t have that sixth sense around what’s going to perform because they haven’t spent the time researching and learning the other things that make it in those worlds.
If you can, I really like doing something new about the new thing. By this I mean essentially if you have a new perspective, that’s great. If you have new data, that’s even better. If you have new news about it, some new development, something that other people don’t know, something that’s heretofore been secret, that’s the best. That kind of stuff can just go huge around a story particularly if you’re doing it right when that story is hot. Something’s happening around WikiLeaks and someone has new information about what’s happening with their DNS hosting or where they’re moving to or what’s the founder’s legal status and they put it out right when the WikiLeaks story is hot, boom, it explodes. Thousands of people share it, hundreds of thousands of clicks, all that kind of stuff. Three weeks from now when the story’s died down, you’re not going to get those clicks.
Finally, when we talked about that relevance, it doesn’t necessarily need to be relevant to what your business sells, but it needs to be relevant to the audience that would be buying what your business sells or that would be a consumer of what your business does. For example, if you are in the office supply space, and you have content around hiring, there’s relevance there. The kind of people who would be buying office supplies maybe have some overlap with that. If you’re in the digital camera space talking about new visual design techniques, that has some relevance. When you get outside of that space, you lose that relevance. Once you’re in that space, what’s great about it is you capture people who will then be branded or remember your brand, and then when they think to themselves, “Oh, I need this type of thing,” they’ll come back to you for it. This is a great way to do that sort of branding thing. Television commercials and advertising buys and guerilla advertising and guerilla marketing have been doing this for years and years.
Last piece, final one, playing to the psychology of the sharing and social spaces. You want to get in their brain. Make those people feel good about sharing the stuff that you do. With whatever content you have, the title is the thing that matters the most. The title of that content is really going to determine whether it lives or dies. You can have some great content, something that’s really interesting, hit on all the stuff I just talked about, but if the title is boring or non-compelling or just doesn’t describe the story well in those few words, and remember you’ve only got a few words in a status update or particularly in a tweet to get that message across. We know that tweets are more shared, more clicked, and more retweeted the shorter they are. Likely the same is true for Facebook status messages. That title has got to rock. Using things like pic, image, chart, or infographic, those words in that title or suggesting that those things are in there means this is going to be very easy for you to consume. You can quickly and easily get through this as opposed to things that are long essays or lengthy videos, that kind of stuff is very time consuming and people who are at work or in their browsing stream or those kinds of things might skip them over and not consume that content instead of click it and share.
The timing is very important not just in terms of what you’re publishing but in terms of when you hit that publish button and when you start spreading the social message. Getting things out there when you know your audience is online, hopefully in front of their computers or mobile devices, browsing these social sites in that social mode, that’s a great time to hit. That’s why you see that spike in some of the data around the science of retweets, right around midday Eastern when the Pacific Coast is waking up and the Midwest is already at work and the East Coast is around hitting lunchtime, that’s when you have your maximum number of people online, and you have London and Western Europe ending their day at work. That time there’s the most amount of people online, on these social sites, and have that big potential to share.
On Facebook you have this concept of “I Like This” versus “I’m Sharing This.” People are going to like the things that they agree with. You’re going to post something. It could be humorous. It could be expressing a political opinion. It could be expressing an opinion about a current event. You’ll see a lot of likes, but you might not see shares and tweets unless people also think that sharing that thing is going to make them look good.
In the social world, it’s all about ego. For that reason, people want to share the things that will make more people want to follow them, that will make them feel, “Oh my gosh, I have to share this with my followers. I have to share this with my friends because then they’ll think more highly of me. It’ll define who I am as a person. This represents me well.” Those types of things, that playing to ego, is critical to being successful in the social space. It’s the reason why when you share things that are not just compelling but are going to make more people follow you, then other people will share those again and again and again because they’ll think, “It’ll make more people follow me too.”
All right. Hopefully this is helping to improve your content shareability. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
If you have any tips or tricks that you’ve learned along the way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!
