Getting other people to share your content is one of the keys to successful content marketing.
I’ve talked before about how you can get brands and influencers to share your content. That’s definitely something to add to your content marketing strategy.
It’s also worth your while to add the snippet strategy where you take one blog post and turn it into a bunch of shares. This is the strategy for creating many different pieces of social media content that you can share on your profiles so you can share the same post over and over without being repetitive.
But one of the most difficult and most frustrating things is getting your friends or even your employees to share your content.
I’ve got a few steps for you to follow to get these people to share your content. It can help your content get more of audience, which means more traffic and more sales for your company.
Let’s get into it.
1. Add Them To An Automated Email Feed
You can probably add employees to the feed without asking their permission, but with friends you’ll want to ask their permission.
One of the biggest roadblocks with sharing information is not realizing there is information to share. Your employees and friends probably aren’t checking your blog for regular updates especially if you’re just starting out with content.
You can setup a blog broadcast with an email service like Aweber. Add your employees to a list and add your friends to another list. Once added, they will receive an email every time you publish a new post.
Just getting your post in front of your friends and employees will make them aware that you have new content. If they find it interesting they’ll gladly share it with their followers on social media.
2. Encourage Snippet Sharing Throughout Your Post
It gets boring sharing the same old title and URL on social media. It works fine, but sometimes you need more interesting information from within your content to get people to share.
This is a good strategy in general, but it can make it easier for your friends and employees to share content.
For each post you create make sure there are snippet opportunities throughout. Highlight these by using the quotations feature on your blog or by adding some kind of CSS design that makes certain content stand out more than the regular content.
The best content for snippets are:
- Stats (25% Of The US Couldn’t Find Alabama On A Map)
- Actions (Update Twitter 10 Times Per Day To Get More Followers)
- Inspiring Information (I Stopped Eating Carbs And Lost 25 Pounds!)
Once you call out these snippets, use the following tools to add share links and share buttons right next to the snippet to encourage sharing:
Here is an example:
Get more engagement by using The Snippet Strategy with every blog post (tweet this)
3. Give Them A Vested Interest In Content Success
You can do this a couple different ways.
For employees, you can tie performance indicators to how well posts do. Make content marketing part of your entire business. It’s just as critical as accounting and IT. This can be more difficult to implement if you hire people that don’t use social media, but if they do there is no reason they can’t share the content.
You can also write about your friends or employees within the content. Ask them to help with the content. Ask for a quote on something or see if they would be interested in contributing part of the content for the post.
When you get people involved in the process they are much more likely to share.
I used to do this when I worked for an ecommerce company. I would ask the merchandisers for information about the latest trends. I would get their permission to quote them and once it was published I would share the link with them. They would want to share the post on their social profiles because the better the post did the more people saw their quote and the better they looked.
If you have friends that are experts in an industry then ask them to contribute to your content. Just have them email you a response to a question. That’s something most people can handle. You can do all the formatting and other stuff while they just have to respond to an email.
Conclusion
These are a couple ways I’ve been able to get people to share content. It’s a critical part of content marketing. You have to get people to share your content otherwise you’re going to be waiting on organic search traffic and that can take a while.
Try these strategies out. You should be able to get your peers to share your content. And you might even be able to figure out other ways to increase sharing.