The global sensation of Wordle has captivated people worldwide, as they eagerly share their game results through social media, blog posts, texts, and emails. This phenomenon provides valuable insights to marketers, demonstrating the influence of content that can be easily shared.
Wordle is a simple and captivating crossword puzzle where players unscramble words. Its popularity stems from the blend of puzzle-solving and general knowledge, offering a refreshing alternative to violent or superficial games. The educational value of Wordle has also contributed to its widespread appeal.
Marketers can learn essential lessons from the triumph of shareable content like Wordle. Key factors for successful shareable content marketing include:
- Excitement and value for readers
- Easy consumption, whether short and sweet
- Simplicity in sharing with others
Shareable content has been a priority for marketers, particularly with the ascent of the social media platform as a primary avenue for connecting with consumers. For example, Falcon’s Digital Marketing Trends for 2022 emphasizes the significance of creating shareable content in today’s digital landscape.
So, What is Shareable Content?
Generally, it refers to any content easily shared on social media platforms, such as blog posts, infographics, images, and videos. The crucial aspect of shareable content lies in its engaging and visually appealing nature. When crafting shareable content, it is essential to consider the intended audience, ensuring the content is exciting and relevant. When done effectively, the audience eagerly shares the content with friends and social media followers.
A more detailed definition of shareable content involves concise content that combines visuals with accompanying text, telling a story that encourages sharing. This can be seen as a setup and payoff. The visual captures the audience’s attention as they scroll through their social media feeds (the setup), and if interested, more shares as they read the accompanying text (the payoff). These two elements work together to create a compelling narrative.
The challenge lies in conveying this narrative within seconds, as social media users often multitask and prefer consuming content swiftly. Therefore, marketers must master creating shareable content that resonates across various platforms, ensuring their message reaches a broader audience.
How to Create Shareable Content
A solid understanding of data forms the cornerstone of any content marketing strategy. Companies need to delve into the psyche of their customers, grasp their needs, and decipher their current interests. It’s a task that often involves audience analytics, unearthing insights from conversational patterns, and tracking the pulse of trending topics.
Once this groundwork is laid, the focus shifts to experimenting with creative elements across various shareable social media content and platforms. In many instances, video content tends to outshine static visuals. This trend is especially noticeable on platforms emphasizing videos, such as TikTok and Snapchat. However, other situations might not align with this trend. For example, when the spotlight is on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter, a video may not elicit as much engagement as a PDF document, an image, or a snappy animated GIF.
Though it might appear otherwise, creating shareable content is not entirely dependent on the format used. It transcends mere aesthetics and leans more into setup and the ensuing payoff. Weaving a captivating story via short paragraphs of shareable content is a skill that requires honing over time. Here, one can draw inspiration from successful instances of content marketing where storytelling has been used significantly in long-form content.
While there are instances where brands stumble upon a viral piece of content fortuitously, it’s a rarity. More often than not, creating highly shareable content is an orchestrated effort rooted in understanding audience preferences, experimenting with formats, and leveraging trends judiciously.
Great Example of Shareable Content
Consider the two-tone dress that had tongues wagging worldwide back in 2015. This garment, simplistic in design yet striking in its visual appeal, was a superb exemplar of shareable content. The upper part of the dress was white, while the lower segment was black, a stark delineation that gave the dress an eye-catching visual effect. To a casual observer, the dress might appear to be a monochrome garment, but upon closer inspection, it was clear it boasted two distinct shades.
What set the dress apart was an optical illusion it created, causing a perception shift depending on one’s viewpoint. While some perceived the dress as blue and black, others were convinced it was white and gold. As a result, the dress became a global sensation, stirring debates about its true colors. Even seven years later, the dress continues to find mention in social media conversations, indicating the lasting impact of valuable content.
Diving into video content, an instance that stands out is the random viral TikTok video of Nathan Apodaca. This video showed Apodaca nonchalantly long-boarding, sipping on Ocean Spray juice, and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s classic tune, “Dreams.” With over 8 million views, it wasn’t just another trending topic but an unintentional content strategy that led to a chain reaction of user-generated content.
People started mimicking Apodaca’s video, sipping Ocean Spray, and dancing to the beats of “Dreams.” As a result, the video garnered attention for Apodaca, Ocean Spray, and Fleetwood Mac, triggering an unexpected resurgence in the band’s popularity. This incident highlighted some important points about how viral content could ripple effects across social media platforms, introducing new audiences to existing brands.
Reflecting on these instances, it becomes evident that creating shareable content is an art that can often have unforeseen, far-reaching consequences. Whether inspired by current events or by accident, social media can create content with unique angles that capture an audience’s imagination, keeping them engaged and driving conversations. The most shared content strikes a chord, triggers a reaction, and becomes part of the broader social conversations.
Diving into the Psyche of Shareability in Content
When crafting shareable content, the elements of psychology provide a crucial foundation for great success. Although no foolproof blueprint exists for viral content, understanding some psychological tenets can tip the scales toward success.
One such key aspect is content-shareable social currency. This principle implies that the likelihood of shared content amplifies if it positions the sharer in a favorable light within their social circle. Hence, content that incites humor, surprise, or even curiosity tends to have a higher shareability quotient than commonplace content.
It is moving onto another influential factor, more engagement – triggers. Content that taps into emotions, or evokes nostalgic memories, tends to stick with the audience. This lasting impact invariably nudges more shares to pass the content shareable to others. Essentially, it’s the emotional resonance that transforms content into shared experiences.
A notable viral content driver is eliciting a sense of awe or wonder. Content that triggers powerful emotions – delight, revulsion, or even fear- spreads faster than content that stirs up milder sentiments, such as melancholy or vexation.
However, even the most original research-enthralling content won’t become a trend without strategic distribution through paid media. Reaching the right audience is vital in the content journey from creation to virality. Hence, post-publication promotion plays a pivotal role in the content itself.
Promotion could entail sharing content across social media channels and platforms, emailing it to a list of subscribers, or even reaching out to industry influencers to have people share content with their follower base. This meticulous orchestration completes a robust content strategy, ensuring the most shared content finds its way to the suitable screens at the right time.
Making Article Content Sharable
Start with Keyword Research
A stone unturned in any successful content strategy is the utilization of keywords. These are the key markers of relevance, the signposts leading potential consumers to the doorway of a brand creating content. Moreover, they function as an essential connectors, aligning the content with those who find it most useful content valuable.
With the wealth of digital tools available today, marketers have a formidable arsenal to assist in exploring keywords. Tools such as SEMRush or Google Keyword Planner offer a wide lens to gaze upon the landscape of keyword possibilities. With these, marketers can tap into the undercurrent of search queries and extract those keywords that align with the interests and needs of their potential consumers.
Selecting relevant keywords isn’t just about tracking popularity or volume. It’s a question of resonance. What terms and phrases resonate with potential consumers? What language are they using, and how do they articulate their needs and interests? This is where the true power of keyword research lies – in the intersection between brand messaging and consumer vernacular.
Readers Share Content From Headlines
Never underestimate the clout of a compelling headline. The magnet pulls readers in, the spark that ignites curiosity. It stands as the frontline ambassador of the content, its most significant advocate.
Engaging emotional triggers is one proven method to craft headlines that pull the reader’s attention. Marketers who skillfully weave emotional appeals into their headlines are often rewarded with a spike in reader engagement. Emotion is a universal language, and when it’s used judiciously, it can create a powerful bond between the content and the reader.
Moreover, constructing captivating headlines involves a dance with curiosity and intrigue. A balance, if you will, between revealing just enough to pique interest yet withholding sufficient details to compel the click. The most enticing headlines promise a revelation, a solution, or a story – they offer a payoff for the reader’s time. A well-crafted headline can convert passing interest into genuine engagement, creating an irresistible invitation to dive deeper into the content.
Telling Compelling Stories
From time immemorial, storytelling has been the lifeblood of human connection, offering a singular vehicle for transmitting ideas, values, and insights. However, when it comes to crafting shareable content, stories are an absolute powerhouse. They enrich the shared information and establish a deeper, more memorable connection with the audience.
Approaching content as a narrative isn’t about spinning yarns of fiction; it’s about shaping the information into a narrative framework that facilitates understanding and retention of interactive content. For example, start with a problem or conflict, introduce the brand or product as the hero to solve this problem, and then how to guide finally portray the resolution. In doing so, the content becomes more than just information—it becomes an experience.
Marketers must appeal to the audience’s emotions to make these narratives memorable. We remember how things make us feel, and a story’s emotional resonance gives people talking about it staying power. A compelling story doesn’t just inform—it inspires, surprises, delights, or even incites.
Creating Engaging Visuals
Our world is awash with content, and amidst this ocean, it’s visually striking that it often rises to the surface more visually. Visuals can amplify the impact of content, creating a richer, more immersive experience for the audience. They’re the garnish that makes the dish irresistible, the spark that ignites interest.
Selecting the right visual components — images, videos, graphics — is an art. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s about relevance and resonance. The best visual elements echo the content’s core message, reinforce its key points, and enhance the overall narrative.
Venturing beyond mere decoration, visuals can be used to tell a story of their own, a concept known as visual storytelling. Visual storytelling transforms content into an engaging, multi-layered experience by aligning images with narrative beats or infographics to depict complex data. It’s the difference between simply presenting information and bringing it to real life together with more visuals.
Utilizing Data and Statistics
Data-driven content is how guides like a lighthouse in the fog of digital noise, guiding the audience toward credibility and trust. Rooting content in statistics and data fortifies its credibility and enhances its shareability. The part immediately tells the difference between an informal claim and a substantiated fact.
The challenge for brands lies in curating relevant and reliable data that support their narrative. This involves diligent research, data collection, and interpretation. Leveraging reliable and reputable sources first, conducting market research, or even mining a company’s internal data can yield valuable insights that can be harnessed to enrich content.
However, the power of data isn’t just in its existence but in its presentation. Data in its raw form can be dry and daunting. But dress it up in a visually compelling infographic or an easy-to-grasp chart, and it becomes an appealing, shareable insight. Presenting data is about transforming complexity into clarity, making the complex simple and the abstract tangible.
Providing Value and Utility
In content creation, value and utility are the currencies that rule. If a piece of content does not serve a business purpose or meet a need, it risks being overlooked. Therefore, companies must consistently deliver content that benefits their business and the audience.
A practical way to provide value is to offer actionable tips, advice top tips, or solutions. Such content doesn’t just paint a picture of the problem—it gives the audience the tools to tackle it. Doing so serves a dual purpose: it positions the blog post and brand as a helpful resource while fulfilling the audience’s need for practical, usable, educational content.
Lastly, shareable content is not just valuable content shared but generous. The most incredibly shareable content prompts readers to think, for example, “I know someone who could benefit from this.” It’s content that is so full of value, so helpful, and entertaining that it almost begs to be shared. And when content is shared, it amplifies the brand’s reach, message, and value.
FAQ
Q: How can marketers create shareable content?
A: Marketers can create shareable content by producing engaging, relevant, and eye-catching visuals.
Q: What role does content marketing play in business?
A: Content marketing is crucial for any business to build brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and create and nurture customer relationships. By consistently producing valuable and informative content, companies can attract and retain their target audience, leading to increased conversions and customer loyalty.
Q: How can marketing teams make their Instagram feed more visually appealing?
A: Brands can use high-quality images, maintain a consistent color scheme and aesthetic, and incorporate a variety of content formats such as photos, videos, and carousels. Additionally, brands should consider using Instagram Stories and Reels to showcase behind-the-scenes content and engage with their audience more interactively.
Q: Why is it essential for marketers to focus on creating highly shareable content?
A: Focusing on creating highly shareable content is necessary for marketers because it increases the likelihood of their content being shared organically, increasing brand exposure, website traffic, and potential conversions.
Q: How can companies drive more organic traffic to their platforms?
A: Brands can drive more organic traffic to their platforms by implementing search engine optimization techniques, creating high-quality and shareable content, and engaging with their communities on social media.