Social Media and Storytelling, Part 3: Creating Content That Gets Shared by Cameron Uganec.
From the post:
In the previous posts, I explored how social media and storytelling can be used by marketers to engage with an audience and build relationships. It turns out that there is another benefit to following a brand storytelling approach; it can increase the shareability of your content. In fact the potential to build relationships coupled with the “viral effect” is what makes storytelling and social media powerful tools for marketers.
My team creates a lot of content. Our content marketing takes many forms: Tweets, Facebook posts, contributed articles, infographics, videos, blog posts etc. In order to unlock the potential value of the ‘earned media’ component of social media we endeavour to make every piece of content shareable. So it’s important that we understand why people share content.
Why People Share
The NYTimes Insights Group published a study that looked at the key factors that influence people to share content. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that sharing is all about relationships. They outlined these key motivations for people to share:
- To bring valuable and entertaining content to others.
- To define ourselves to others.
- To grow and nourish relationships.
- To get the word out about causes and brands I care about.
When you are creating content it’s important to be mindful of what the motivation of your audience is. When planning each piece of content our team answers these questions:
- How does this add value for our audience?
- How will this help or entertain them?
- Why will they share it?
(…)
I am going to pick up the prior posts in this series and suggest that you do the same.
At least if you are interested in other people marketing your product, services, topic maps for you.
Sounds like a good deal to me.
Other posts in this series:
Social Media and Storytelling, Part 1: Why Storytelling?
Social Media and Storytelling, Part 2: Back to the Future
Social Media and Storytelling, Part 3: Creating Content That Gets Shared (subject of this post)
Social Media + Storytelling = Awesomesauce (presentation by Cameron at Marketo’s 2013 Summit Conference in San Francisco)