One large draw to Social media for users is the fact that it provides a space to share ideas, likes, dislikes, interests, finds and more. The content of course varies from platform to platform, but at the heart of each share is the desire for people to pass along top of mind information to their followers. This type of sharing has evolved over time from simple status updates to now include any and every piece of content you can imagine, like photos, videos, articles, quizzes and more. But what exactly should you be putting out into the social world in order to garner shares?
Every channel is its own unique entity. You cannot assume the content you produce on one network is going to work on or be appropriate for another, so you have to tackle each one individually.
Facebook is flooded with a constant stream of information that is highly sharable. The best approach for your brand to figure out what will work on this particular channel is to play around with different types of posts. If you’re a food brand, recipe posts with strong imagery and links to complete dish descriptions could be successful. Maybe you’re an IT company and your consumers resonate more with quizzes and polls.
Each audience will have their own preferences, but as a general rule of thumb make sure you’re using high quality, properly sized photos, videos that are short enough to be easily digestible and properly formatted links that fall in line with Facebook’s new guidelines (meaning they need to appear as generated links and not as standard posts that have links pasted in the body of text).
Not surprisingly, Twitter has become a much more visual forum, just like the rest of its social competitors. Tweets that include images receive far more engagement than those with plain text, and this should be kept in mind when crafting a Twitter strategy. The recommendation here would be to tweet directly through the native platform when posting images so they appear as twitpics, and to again use proper dimensions when doing so.
Additionally, take advantage of Twitter’s trending topics when tweeting in real-time, because those topics of conversation are what people on the channel are talking about at that given point in time, and getting in on those conversations could get your brand in front of a larger audience and potential influencers.
Pinterest is a platform that was built for the sole purpose of sharing. Though the content being shown on Pinterest is pretty varied, at the end of the day, all users are on the channel to show off their collection of pins.
When it comes to your brand building a presence on the network, keep in mind that since Pinterest is so visual, you’ll want to be using high quality imagery. Your pictures need to stand out amongst millions of others, therefor, the more eye catching your photos are the better your chances are of being repinned. There are many popular searched items on Pinterest now as well, so definitely dig into the analytics the platform offers in order to figure out what speaks to your own audience, and remember to keep an eye on the boards your users are frequenting most so you can incorporate those outside pins into your own content approach.
LinkedIn is a bit different from the above channels as its audience leans more towards the professional side. That’s not to say there aren’t specific parameters to follow when it comes to getting your posts shared though, because there are.
The most engaging content on LinkedIn comes in the form of linked posts. You should be linking your followers to actionable content and articles about things like company events, industry news, conferences and your latest blog posts. When creating this content, you will want to attach professional quality pictures, because as you already know, imagery always draws in more attention.
Of course to really drive engagement and encourage social sharing a paid approach is always recommended. Social Media is a pay to play world, and in order to compete effectively you really need to have an extra push like ad dollars. With the proper spend and interesting content in place, you should be seeing your shares increase in no time.
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