Many people think that making their content “sharable” means adding social icons to the bottom of their posts. Social icons give your readers an opportunity to share your content, but that has nothing to do with whether your content is sharable or not.
How many readers do you get on a piece of content versus the number of times that content is shared? It’s probably shared a lot less than it’s read, right. That’s understandable, but the goal is to increase the share rate of your content overall.
Think of it as your content’s conversion rate. While some content is designed to get someone to buy a product or service, most blog posts “convert” when they get someone to share it on their social networks. The more shares you get the more people are likely to see and read it . . . and share it themselves.
Look at any blog and you can see that some content gets shared a lot more than other content. A lot of that will be based on the title alone. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]A great title not only attracts more readers but increases the sharability of the content.[/inlinetweet]
But the title can’t do it alone. There are a few other things you can do to make it more sharable.
How to Make Sharing Easy
- Formatting: If your content is broken up with paragraph headings and bullet points, it makes it that much easier to read. Don’t be afraid to chop up your eloquent poise into bullet points that can be easily taken in. That beats burying them in paragraphs of content where the whole point is liable to get lost.
- Digestible Sentences: As a matter of readability, it helps if you write in easily digestible sentences. Sure, long sentences using big words may sound super-smarterific, but unless you’re purposely making up words to make a point, they’ll generally bog down the comprehension level of your post. It doesn’t matter if the reader understands all the words, that style alone can make the whole post more difficult to digest.
- Ah-ha Moments: [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]The most sharable content presents a unique view, tip or strategy that the reader didn’t previously know.[/inlinetweet] If you can include just one “ah-ha” point in your content, you’ll up the sharability exponentially.
Of the three things noted above, the ah-ha moment is the most difficult. The others can simply be handled with a good proofreader. If you don’t want to take the time to make your content easier to read, empower a proofer to do it for you. But the ah-ha moments are all on you. If you can include all three of these in each piece of content, you’ll be on your way to increasing your content’s sharability and audience reach.