How to boost the social sharing of your content

With so much content flooding social media platforms today, combined with the updating and changing of algorithms, it can be easy for your stories to be pushed out of sight.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin are becoming crucial drivers of business success. Shares on such platforms can be likened to the gold of social media, especially for smaller businesses.

With each share, your brand message and offerings are relayed to an entirely new audience which can greatly facilitate the generation of leads and sales.

With this in mind, it’s important to ensure that your content doesn’t get swallowed whole by your social media feed. To elevate social sharing and drive better results, try following these tips:

Is your content up to scratch?

One of the predominant reasons your content engagement may be turning a little stale is due to lack of strong, interesting content.

Good content should focus on providing value to the customer’s journey. Ask yourself, is the content I’m producing insightful, interesting, and in-depth? Simply rehashing old content for content sake will fail to catch the interest of your audience.

You should also consider the format of your content. The use of good visuals, videos, strong headlines and providing information in bite-sized points are all proven ways of heightening engagement.

Give your employees a voice

Encouraging your employees to get involved on social media (otherwise known as employee advocacy) is a growing strategy for boosting content engagement.

Just one post shared by all of your employees can offer a great chance to increase the visibility of content, thereby improving brand recognition and providing a competitive advantage.

Recent research found that branded messaged reach 561 percent further when shared by employees rather than through the company’s own channels.

Encourage your employees to not only simply share company content, but to also add their own voice and opinion to what they’re sharing. This will portray them as a much more human and as genuinely interested in the content they’re sharing- not just doing it because their boss said so!

While encouraging employees to share company content on social benefits the business in terms of traffic, brand recognition, leads and more, it’s not just a one-way street.

For employees, there are also many benefits to sharing content. It helps them establish themselves as a thought-leader in the industry, grow their own professional network, and boost career growth. So, it’s a win-win!

Let your competitors inspire you

This doesn’t mean to say that you should bookmark your competitors’ website and duplicate all of their content. However, it is true to say that your competitors can be a great source of inspiration.

Take note of your top competitors and have a look at what kind of topics they’re writing about, the questions they’re answering, and the industry-related content they’re engaging with and sharing on social media.

Furthermore, tools such as Buzzsumo and Sprout Social can show you the most shared content of any website (including your competitors). Use these insights to inform your content strategy. Are there any common trends to those posts which are attracting the most engagement?