Regift this: 6 tips to boost content sharing

Outside of marketing, a regift would be considered a great insult to the recipient. In the content world, it’s one of the end goals: to get your reader to appreciate what you’ve provided so much that they wrap it up in the form of a tweet, social post or email and share the gift of your insight with someone else.

So how can we as content marketers ensure our e-books and buyer’s guides are just as regift-worthy as the label maker Elaine gave to dentist Tim Whatley back in 1995?

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you want to create shareable content for your audience:

Make it visual.

Between attention spans that are now shorter than goldfish (huh?) to competing for clicks in newsfeeds, your content is pretty much DOA without something pretty to look at. With Canva, HubSpot, Visme and others, it’s pretty simple for even an impatient, non-technical person like myself to create a shiny wrapper for my content. Of course the visual should also be optimized for each platform so it doesn’t look wonky in the newsfeed. And don’t forget the alt tags and meta descriptions.

Be provocative in the headline.

In a previous post, I shared Copyblogger Brian Clark’s fun idea of pretending the headline of your post is on the cover of Cosmo. It doesn’t get more provocative than that. Tweak “11 Reasons We All Date Guys We Don’t Even Like That Much” to read “11 Reasons Your Customers Don’t Even Like You That Much” and you’ve got yourself a headline that commands a click.

Show some emotion.

BufferSocial introduced me to this fun headline analyzer that measures the emotional value (EMV) of a headline in only seconds. Posts with a higher EMV perform better, but there are certain emotions with more appeal than others (obviously). Which emotions motivate the most shares?

Go long.

It may seem bassackwards, but the longer the content, the more likely it is to be shared. According to some super-intelligent professors at the University of Pennsylvania, word count was the most significant correlation in content sharing. My non-scientific theory is that longer length has a higher perceived value. That being said, it’s important to ensure that the post doesn’t ramble on to reach the recommended 1,000-word plus post. Sure, readers love their snackable content, but they share their substantive content more.

Make it easy.

One click is all it should take to regift your content. Including the tally/scoreboard of likes, shares, etc. visible on the page can help inspire others to spread the love.

Other tactics for eas(ier) sharing include:

ShareThis – is a free plug-in for a range of platforms that allows you to customize and analyze your shared content.

Click to Tweet – this descriptive plug-in does exactly that — allows readers to retweet your tweet with a single click directly from the post, then track the activity of each link.

Don’t forget the basics. When trying to be visual, provocative, emotional, wordy, user-friendly and a slew of other adjectives, it’s easy to forget the foundations of any piece of content: helpfulness and quality.

We hope your newsfeeds and inboxes see a spike in regifts of high-value content this season. Happy Holidays from everyone at Rep Ink!