6 Tips for Fabulously Shareable Blog Content – From A Guy Who Did His Homework

What do we need to do to get people to read our content? This is a topic with which I spend a lot of quality time. Whether brainstorming with my clients, or coming up with the next topic for the Studio’s blog – the question is always about – what will bring value to our readers? What will motivate them to click on the title? To read the entire post?

I recently came across an interesting blog post by Brian Lang, guest blogger on Unbounce, and small business blogger, entrepreneur and marketer. The topic he presents is “6 Things I Learned from Analyzing the Most Shared Blog Posts from Top Content Marketers.” The title was enough to get me to click. And I even read the whole post through (admittedly, not every single one of all the 1734 words – but just about, including the memes and gifs).

The bottom line is interesting. You may not agree, but it’s definitely worth a review. Namely:

1. Content that is supported by beautiful pinable visual content (with valuable insights) will win you a lot of social shares.

The supporting data Brian presents is as follows:

-- Proof point: Content with images gets 94% more views and receives 150% more retweets.

-- Example: the most shared post of the Content Marketing Institute (“21 Types Of Content We Crave,” recently updated to “31 Types of Content We Crave”; where one of them is “content that alleviates our greatest fears” – also pointing to the topic of the last two posts we put up, see here and here) has over 40,000 total shares — more than quadruple the shares of even their second-most shared post.

90% of those shares came from Pinterest! That is, it contained a beautiful piece of visual content that readers were inspired to pin and share. Get yourself a great designer and make sure your content has supporting image/s that is/are so beautiful, your readers will share.

2. Expert roundups make for highly shareable content: Brian provides as an example a fact from Social Media Examiner — one of the most popular blogs in the online marketing sphere, where 3 of its top 5 most shared posts are expert roundups.

3. You don’t have to optimize content for SEO to be shareability optimized: this reflects the old adage among content marketers– content is king. Great content is what converts. If it brings value, it will be shared. Brian notes that sometimes it’s better to create a title that is compelling rather than one that is targeting a keyword for SEO purposes.

4. Controversy and different perspectives can make content stand out and get noticed. Who doesn’t love a little controversy?

5. Anti-segmentation: this one raised an eyebrow. It’s not intuitive, and goes against all the persona-centric principles I firmly believe in and live by. Brian notes that publishing content that is broader in scope will more likely to resonate with a larger audience. This is good, when you have a top-of-the-funnel agenda, i.e. for social reach and brand awareness. However, when you’re looking for bottom of the funnel conversions, I will always say that you would be best served to be persona first.

6. List Posts: Frankly, I don’t do much of these, though Brian claims that when they’re done right, list posts often result in a high number of social shares.

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