The Art of Social Sharing
Originally published on Vulpine Interactive
Sharing a post is the most basic action one can take on social media.
And it may sound simple…
But, it’s not.
Nothing ever is, right?
Unfortunately, as with anything else in digital marketing (or in life), a seemingly simple concept often lends itself to complication the minute you swim away from the wall and decide to dip under the surface.
Once you take the plunge into the depths of social media marketing, you will learn that something as easy as sharing a post actually has its roots wrapped up in a strategy somewhere.
Nothing should ever be done arbitrarily, which is why laying out a strategy comes before content calendars and posting schedules.
All in all, the main goal of posting on social media should be to provide something of value to your audience, so learning everything you can about them and applying that knowledge to your strategy will help you determine what you should be sharing.
Types of Social Shares
When it comes to social sharing, there are several different types of post, each with their own specific objective.
Typically, it is a best practice to use a mix of each type of post, but every company is going to have a different strategy for social sharing.
What you choose to share should depend on your industry, the type of content you are producing, how much content you are producing in-house, how viral your company / brand / product is, your relationship with your audience, among other things.
Listed here are the different types of social shares and when you should use them.
1. Status Updates
The goal of posting a status update is to tell your followers what’s going on inside your business.
These types of posts usually don’t contain links to off-channel content (and are usually created on a whim without much thought or strategy behind them).
Whether it be an update about an event you hosted, a company birthday party, or a job opening, the reason for posting a status update is almost always because you want to appear active, engaged, and thoughtful on social media.
Oftentimes, company status updates are generic and lack value, so I don’t recommend posting this style of content too frequently unless you already know your audience responds well to it.
2. Promoting Content or Products
Another type of social share is a promotional post.
Typically, B2B companies will share their content with links back to their website, and B2C companies will share links to products.
Like status updates, these types of posts are very self-promotional in nature and are posted with the hopes of driving traffic.
A good rule of thumb is to give, give, give, give, give, give harder, then ask.
3. Curating Content
Content curation is the act of taking content from other companies, places, and people, and sharing it with your own audience.
This tactic has been widely utilized as a way to grow followings and gain domain authority.
You may be asking yourself, “Why should I curate content from other places and put that in my newsfeed? Why should I send people to other sites that aren’t my own?”
And the answer is simple.
You should do these things because you are serving your audience, not yourself. (Seeing a trend here?)
As a true value-driven marketer or business owner, you should be focused on helping by any means necessary.
It could take a lifetime to build out an extensive content library in-house. However, if you curate content from other sources, you will have a lot more to post and you can grow followers without investing so heavily in content creation.
Link Retargeting
Another tactic that can be used alongside of content curation is something called link retargeting.
Link retargeting allows you to cookie users who have clicked on a specific link. In essence, it allows you to pixel people who click on curated content so that you can serve them your own ads at a later time, thus adding more value to the content curation tactic.
With link retargeting, you can build out your audience 500%+ faster, capture anyone who you’ve influenced online, and expand the awareness portion of your funnel to redirect people to your site in the future.
We use custom Rebrandly domains for all of our clients and offer this as part of our content curation package, but there are other tools that can do this as well.
Your goal with content curation should be to:
- Find relevant information that your audience will love that you haven’t been able to create for yourself yet.
- Use people’s response to the content curation efforts to determine what articles/videos/etc you should create.
- Share from relevant industry influencers so that you can attempt to grow your audience off of their audience.
- Consider using link retargeting or some other form of “tagging” your users for each post.
- Become seen as a source for breaking news, even when you didn’t create it. Over time people should be able to trust your feed with being best-in-industry, even better than the individual places where you are curating from.
- Stay true to your brand and don’t get too Top of Funnel. I’ve seen some people in the Digital Marketing space start talking about productivity and health, etc. That is not why people follow you, stay focused on your core competency.
- Use content curation as a way to build real relationships with partners and influencers. Share the stuff of the people you admire, but also think you can have a conversation with (for instance, I can share Elon Musk’s post all day long, but we won’t have a sit down anytime soon). From there reach out to the person, let them know you love their stuff and think there is an opportunity to work together. It’s way better than a truly cold email, and gives you time to “pre-vet” them for quality.
Want to know more about the different types of social posts you can use? Read the full blog post here.
