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Is it #Shareworthy?

James Buckhouse
Design Story
2 min readNov 27, 2012

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Niche bloggers, big brands, start-ups, and thought-leaders listen up: Every time you tweet or post, ask yourself if your audience will want to pass it along.

Coca-cola uses the term #shareworthy as a part of their “Liquid and Linked” approach to content strategy, but what about the rest of us? Can we learn something from Coke? One way to make sure your content is eminently shareable is to only share information that will actually make a difference in your audience’s life.

“Give your audience something that actually makes their lives better.”

Does your content make people smarter, better, kinder, more creative? Or are you filling them with more branded-clutter? If you doubt how much influence your content can have on a person’s brain, then skim this 10-min film about the brains of kids, the internet, and sharable content.

Your content will only have an impact if it solves for people’s needs every step of the way. Try this: Only write content that actually brings value to each person it touches. Your audience is made of people, not credit cards or userIDs.

Here’s a few more tips:

1) Connect people to the resources they need.
2) Carefully curate examples of tricky problems well solved.
3) Family, friends, and hope are more important than “features.”
4) Faster or better trumps new.
5) Hidden value delights.

“Final check: Does this make the world
a better place?”

If your Tweet or post or photo or video or PDF helps make the world a better place, then succinctly articulate why and share it immediately.

If not, then skip it. No one unfollows an account for tweeting too little. Honor your audience’s attention and treat their brains with care.

Learn how to optimize for repeatabilty.

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James Buckhouse
James Buckhouse

Written by James Buckhouse

Design Partner at Sequoia, Founder of Sequoia Design Lab. Past: Twitter, Dreamworks. Guest lecturer at Stanford GSB/d.school & Harvard GSD jamesbuckhouse.com