Best Practices In Content Sharing To Increase Brand Awareness

by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on October 24, 2021

Content sharing helps increase brand awareness of your website. When people share your content, you gain exposure for every web asset that’s amplified.

As part of a content promotion process of any brand, content sharing involves the use of social media platforms and other websites with significant engagement to circulate links of pages and content itself relevant to the audience.

One leverage to maximize content sharing on your content is to understand how people are being influenced, particularly persuaded to take any action that you desire.

 

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Psychology of Persuasion Applied to Content Sharing

Influence matters to get people to share content. But how do you build or get one for your brand?

In the book “Influence: The Psychology of Influence” written by Robert B. Cialdini, he covers six universal principles to influence anyone better. These principles can help content marketers to make action plans on how they can get their target users to share their relevant content online.

Let’s start with the principle of reciprocity. It says, “If I do something for you, then you can or must do what I ask of you.” By showing initiatives that bring value to your audience, your action can be reciprocated through a social share of your content piece.

The second principle that speaks of “I can’t have it, I want it” — scarcity. If there are only a few people who get access to your content, it becomes more valuable than if it’s available to consume by everyone.

“Liking” tells people, “If you like me then you are more likely to do what I ask of you.” It speaks of pre-conditions that make you likable in the first place — which helps you get the attention you deserve. There is a higher likelihood when you ask people to look at your page and to share it with their social profiles when the brand or personality who asked of those desired actions is likable.

When you have built content authority, there is an immediate advantage to get the following – leading more eyeballs to your content. Social sharing is easier this time.

Another principle of influence is social proof – which refers to any people’s recommendations to a certain thing. If a person you know shares a content piece and/or he or she recommends you to take a look at the article, you’re likely to read it.

The last influence principle of persuasion plays a significant role in how your content can be shared online is commitment or consistency. A consistent brand voice, style, and messaging in content, for example, helps create brand recall to your web assets. This helps further better social sharing from followers and brand advocates.

So those are six principles that you can leverage for effective content sharing.

Now let’s discuss some actionable tips that you can immediately implement right now.

Best Basic Practices in Content Sharing

1. Build your social media follower base.

Most content marketers would go out, connect with other like-minded people, and start sharing links of their pages. While that itself makes continuous content sharing possible, it is good to begin also building your social media base.

That means putting enough effort to add more followers to your social media profiles — these followers may include content creators whom you can absorb additional advocates from.

Here are some tips for building your social media base.

Create your social media profiles. Start with this activity first. Invest in appealing visual designs for your profile photos. This will help establish your social media brand. You can check out these articles for the basic setup of social media profiles — RavenTool’s Social Media Setup Checklist and Improve Your Social Media Profiles In Less Than An Hour by HootSuite. 

Start asking your existing offline followers/fan base, contacts, and networks of people to follow your personal/corporate social profiles.

By this time, you also need to understand your context of messaging. It begins by knowing your audience well — the channel or platform they mostly engage in, language or style they use, even their level or type as an audience.

Start sharing content pieces you produce on your blog, as well as other relevant articles that you find useful to your target customers. This gives a variety to your content sharing, besides just promoting your content.

2. Add social sharing capabilities to your content.

To continuously get social shares, your content must be shareable.

It’s pretty basic, but I’ve seen articles that don’t have any social sharing buttons to share links. And even if they have social shareability, the odds are it includes too many networks — which their audience doesn’t usually use for content sharing.

You may also add tweetability (I just made up this term) of your content by looking for quotes or statements impressive for sharing. You can install the Click to Tweet plugin and set up statements for Twitter sharing.

In addition, make sure you link to social profiles of names you mentioned in your post. That means, simply linking to their Twitter profiles if they have one. It’s an excellent way to catch people monitoring mentions of their profile links and more likely even to share your content with their networks.

3. Get more citations from external content assets

As important as building your social follower base — investing resources to enlarge your following and promoting your content, you also want to look things externally.

For example, you can link to your relevant articles on your blog from your external content assets (e.g., guest posts). This will help increase the visibility of your content, as people could go through links and check your content.

4. Connect with influencers for content collaboration.

Influencer marketing is a buzzword these days. Every content marketer wants to engage in that initiative.

Take a look at the phrase’s search trend, for example.

But how can one take advantage of influencer marketing?

In my guide on influencer outreach, I covered a lot more detail on how we can maximize the use of influencer marketing as part of content marketing campaigns.

It offers great opportunities for anyone – brand and independent personalities to get more following. In our subject, today, establishing a constant series of action plans for content sharing.

You can start by reaching out to influencers to get inputs on topics of their expertise. By having an interview series in mind, you’ll be able to craft content that’s meaningful to use for your audience.

I started my blog in 2013 by producing a series of interviews with digital marketing experts. I initially looked for local search marketing experts as I’ve had a few built relationships back then — making it easier to ask them to answer some of my questions.

As you are growing your brand, you may also start collaborating with influencers for a piece of content. It’s likely to give a boost in content sharing, as both social accounts are used to promote and amplify the content asset.

For further readings on influencer marketing, You can check out this guide on becoming an influencer by Jason Acidre, and this last year’s presentation by Rand Fishkin on building influence (an evergreen resource). 

5. Associate yourself with larger publications.

From a branding and SEO perspective, you can get more exposure through associating your site with more prominent names in your industry.

That is doable by becoming a regular contributor to larger publications in your space. Because they have a lot of traffic and are targeting the same audience as you’re targeting, they can pass through additional followers that will help grow more of your social following base.

In essence, you’re collecting and grabbing opportunities from people and entities your brand is partnering with.

Further Resources:

• How to Become a Content Creator
• Content Distribution Playbook by Ross Simmonds

Content Sharing Made Simpler

With different platforms to engage your audience today, social sharing of your content becomes more feasible. Start looking for ways to establish your social media following based, grow it to enhance brand awareness, and deliver more value to your audience using your content.