Shareability puts the social in social media.

It’s the ultimate nod of approval to the quality of your post – the audience has viewed, consumed, engaged and are compelled to pass it on.

And that’s good news for your organisation.

Getting the shareability right means greater exposure for your brand. It means your message is being seen by as wide an audience as possible.

However, be warned, even when armed with the below information, you’ll not hit the mark every single time, there’ll always be a degree of what worked last time didn’t work this time.

But nor is shareability some elusive holy grail.

So, with a nod to existing research into social, a grasp of social insights and analytics, and the time and patience to carefully craft your content, it’s theoretically within your grasp.

If you are investing in social, place shareability at the very core of your strategy.

Rule 1: Never underestimate the power of visual content
It’s simple, images and video are key to everything you do on social.
Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without images while adding images to your Twitter updates can generate 150% more Retweets than your usual plain-text updates. (source)
Furthermore, it’s predicted that this year video content will represent 74% of all internet traffic (source).

Video marketing cheat sheet

Video marketing cheat sheet

The numbers put it into perspective – captivating and eye catching visuals are key.

Rule 2: Elicit emotions and ask questions
When we care, we share. Think of all the social content you have shared in a personal capacity and ask what made you want to share. Inevitably you will have laughed or cried, felt anger or surprise, been amazed, thrilled, astounded or heart broken. Whatever the emotion, it elicited a response – and a desire to pass it on.
Neil Patel writes that posts that go viral do so “because they instigate the reader to feel a particular emotion strongly. Maybe it’s making your target audience jubilant. Maybe it makes them sad or even angry. Whatever it is, it’s what you want for your media marketing.”

Rule 3: Your content as social currency
People love to share content that makes them look good or smart or funny. Back in 2013, LinkedIn notified its “elite members of their eliteness.”
In turn thousands took to Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about their new-found status because it made them feel good. And of course, to do that they made LinkedIn part of an even bigger conversation and got more people signing up for their network.

Rule 4: Solve a problem
If it’s news you can use, it’s going to get shared. Money saving advice, recipes, ‘how to fix it’ videos – if it’s content that sorts a common problem within your niche, it’ll be worthy of passing on.

Because we all love help solving a problem or because we love the when the difficult is made look simple, content of this kind is a real winner – it’s little surprise that the following has had almost 7 million shares.

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