By Kim Garst

Creating highly shareable content is the quickest way to grow your audience, subscribers and consequently sales.When your content gets shared, you get in front of a whole new audience, and you gain masses of social proof too.Social Media has been dubbed pay to play, but if you have highly engaging and shareable content , the less you need to rely on paying for reach as your content will do the job for you.

Well, it’s easier said than done, right?! Don’t worry, after reading this, you’re going to find it easy to create highly shareable content!

Why Content is a BEACH
Say that aloud and you get the idea… creating highly shareable and engaging content is tough.You put all this effort into crafting the perfect posts, researching, writing, proofreading, publishing and promoting… and what happens?

Nothing!No likes, no comments, and definitely no shares.Just silence.Crickets chirping in the distance… mocking you.We call this Content Crickets and it sucks!Nobody wants this, and we’re here to show you how to never get it again!

There’s only 5 fundamental reasons why people are going to share your content on social and it comes in an easy to remember acronym, which funnily enough is: BEACH

That’s right, BEACH actually stands for something! That’s why content really is a BEACH!

So here you go, the 5 reasons why people will share your content.
B is for Brand Advocacy
People will simply share your content because they are fans of your brand.

Let us tell you a story about this, and not just any kind of story… a loooove story.

But not the 50 Shades of Social Media kind of story! Haha.

Last year we were doing a live broadcast on Periscope after Social Media Marketing World 2016, and there was a lady who was really enjoying all of our tips.We won’t tell you her name, but in the spirit of things, let’s call her Lady Grey!After the broadcast, Lady Grey sent us a message saying how much she enjoyed our Periscope.

The typical thing to do here is reply, “Thanks Lady Grey! Really appreciate that, have a great day!”

BUT INSTEAD we recorded a Twitter video reply to her saying thank you, and asking her questions about her business too, which led to a great conversation.

You know what, she LOVED IT! She loved the fact that we’d taken the time to record a personalised video just to her, and that we took an interest in her. What followed then shocked us.

We started to see over the next few days, weeks and months that she would Like, Comment, and Retweet EVERYTHING we Tweeted. In fact, she’d even go on our blog and share our blogs too.She fell in love with our brand. She was now a brand advocate.But we wanted more.We are marketers after all!

What if we could replicate this? What if today we had just one person Retweeting everything we did, tomorrow we two people, and three the next day… what if after 6 months we had hundreds of people Retweeting us, how cool would that be?!Wouldn’t you like that too?

Top Tips to Creating More Brand Advocates
Be Proactive
You might not be a big influencer with loads of people saying how great you are yet. So what you need to do is get out there, find your perfect clients and engage with them FIRST!Too many people are lazy when it comes to social and only reply to comments, rather than go out there and comment on other people’s posts first.

If you want to create new relationships and keep up with existing relationships, make regular time in your diary to proactively go out and interact with people.There’s a great tool called ‘Cloze’ which assesses your social following and emails and tells you who you need to keep in touch with on a regular basis.

Remember that the algorithms on social media platforms now give preference to posts from people who you interact more with… thus the more conversations you’re having, the more reach you’re going to get on your posts. Simply because, If people are interacting with your content/account, the algorithms will show more of your posts to them. It makes sense, so let’s use this to our advantage!

Be Reliable
Brand advocates will share your content even without reading it in most cases – because they know what to expect from your content. They know the style, they know it will be great quality and they blindly trust you enough to share it without even reading.

This ONLY comes from being there for them consistently over time. So keep up the good work, try your best with every post, don’t get lazy, and show up regularly. Be someone they can rely on every time to create content they love.

Have a Mission
No one can be a fan of someone who’s just out to make money. What do you stand for that your audience can get behind?

Let them in
People can’t be fans of people they don’t really know, so let them in a little bit more. Tell your story, share things with your audience that you might only tell your friends, be humble and modest rather than bragging, tell people your flaws and allow them to feel something for you.

Also show them your face more! People can get behind a face more than a logo, we learnt this in a big way when we started our Youtube channel (www.youtube.com/andrewandpeteTV). Our fans shot up the more we put our faces out there.

Brand Advocacy: If you want more shares, create more fans.

E is for Emotion
If we can tap into emotions we unlock the power to move people into action.

Pete’s brother, John, was doing an epic run for charity – 7 marathons in 7 days. It’s an incredibly tough feat, most people couldn’t bear to run one marathon, nevermind 7 in a row! It was a huge challenge but one he was doing for a good cause.

John calls Pete one day in distress and says, “Bro, you do marketing or something right?”

(Haha thanks brother!)

“Yeh, how can I help” I said.

John, “I’m killing myself here, I’m working 80hr weeks with my job that’s stressing me out, and then on top of that I’m trying to fit in time to train for these marathons, I’ve got to eat, sleep and on top of that raise some money. Thing is, I’ve been trying to raise some money for like 6 months and I’m getting nowhere! What do I do?! I’m running out of time!”

He’d built up his Facebook page to over 200 likes, but do you know how much money he’d raised in 6 months?

£10. ($12.90)

OUCH!!

It just wasn’t worth it.

He’d poured his heart out to me, so we told him to do just that on video. Tell your story, show your audience how much effort you’re really putting into it, what it means to you, show your training high altitude simulation mask you have to wear, show the miserable weather you’re out in… be honest, raw and open.

Overnight the video got over 60 shares, 6,000 views, and reached over 10,000 people! It then got picked up by a page with over a million pages Likes and got a ton more engagement there.Overnight he received just under $4,000 in donations. Wow!

He then got picked up by the world renowned Coors Light who went on to sponsor John for even more money!

Incredible. It just goes to show what a little emotion can do for you.

But there’s lot’s of different emotions you can tap into:

You’ve got no excuse to creating vanilla content when you can tap into all these different emotions.But which is the best emotion that will drive the most amount of shares?It’s the more ‘High Arousal’ emotions that always perform the best. And NO we don’t mean like that! We’re falling into 50 shades of social media again here haha.

What we mean by that is, the more extreme the emotion, the more it moves people.

E.g. Something that makes you mildly amused isn’t going to make you share as much as something that has you rolling around laughing.Something that makes you mildly discontent, has less power than something that makes you really disgusted and frustrated. You see the difference?

Emotion: If you want more shares, tap into high arousal emotions.

A is for Appearance
Everybody wants to look good in front of their peers, it’s just natural.

People will only share content online that aids them in their goals to portray themselves how they want to be seen, whether that’s helpful, caring, funny, in the know, smart, sexy, trendy and so on.So we need to reverse engineer this and think about how we can create content that makes our audience look good by sharing.

Chubbies are a great example of this; Chubbies make shorts and swimwear. Now they’re great quality shorts but still – that’s pretty much all they do and there’s only so much content you can produce about shorts right? Nobody’s really that interested in how shorts are made or how to put shorts on or whatever. So what Chubbies do is create content all around the fun things you can do whilst wearing shorts, for example:

What do you think this would make you look like if you shared this post? Fun? You betcha!

Chubbies has grown incredibly fast by appealing to their target audiences own appearance.

Now it’s your turn, how can your content make your audience look good by sharing your content.

Social Media Examiner knows that it’s target market (budding social media experts) want to look more ‘in the know’ and knowledgeable to their audience, so what do they do? They create highly in depth how-to articles and post about the latest features/breaking news on Social Media, thus making their audience look like they’re keeping up with current trends and features by sharing.

Appearance: If you want more shares, help your audience look good with your content.

C is for Causes and Beliefs
If you can align your brand to something your audience is passionate about and cares about then you hold the power to be shared. This is Cause-Based Content Marketing.

Uber did a great campaign with this idea, they teamed up with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) – a charity supporting those who have lost loved ones due to drunk driving and raising awareness to reduce drunk driving. They beautifully executed the cause based content marketing approach with a July 4th Independance Day campaign. For the July 4th weekend, Uber promoted a unique discount code that, when redeemed, resulted in a $1 donation to MADD ($10 for new customers).

They produced a series of blogs about it, they held a press release and they had a hashtag: #LeaveTheKeys – and did this get shared? Yes! Just think of all the people whose lives had been impacted by drunk driving and everyone who just wants to promote safe driving. Of course they’re going to share the message because it’s so important to them, and every time they do, they’re also spreading the good word of Uber.

How can you apply this to your business?
Success in this arena is all about developing the right strategy and executing it in an authentic, organic way that brings mutual benefit to everyone involved. So it needs to be real – there’s no point in just picking a random charity that you don’t care about, because that lack of authenticity will come across. BUT it also needs to support something relevant to your business and audience.

With Uber – their product IS the solution to the cause, the hashtag #LeaveTheKeys is really just #BookAnUber in disguise!So what are the issues and causes that are important to you AND your audience? Remember, it doesn’t just have to be charity based, it can be any mission that you feel strongly about.

Causes and Beliefs: If you want more shares, align your brand to a cause that is both real and relevant

H is for High Value
You’ve probably heard of this one before… ‘givers gain’.We’re all trying to produce quality, valuable content yes?But we’re here to push you on that.When we first got the opportunity to write for Social Media Examiner – a world leading publication in our industry, what do you think we did?

We went all out! We did a ton of research, we created unique GIFs for it, we made images, we edited it and proof read it over and over again and it was super in depth. It was one of the best articles we’d ever wrote. We spent weeks on it.

And did it get shared?

Yeh! A ton! It went down so well, and we were extremely chuffed.BUT, hang on a minute…Why are we putting that much effort into this guest blog and not OUR OWN content!!We were only spending 30mins-2hrs on our our own content. No wonder our own blog wasn’t taking off!

It was from this moment on that we decided to put more effort into making our content better and giving as much value as we could.Straight away we saw enormous benefits of doing this, more shares than ever, more fans, more subscribers and more customers!That was a big shock to our system that realization. So our question to you is really think about how much value you are giving with your content. How can you add more value?Go the extra mile, it’s never crowded.

High Value: If you want more shares, the more valuable your content needs to be.

Content’s a BEACH
To summarize then:

Brand Advocacy: If you want more shares, create more fans.

Emotion: If you want more shares, tap into high arousal emotions.

Appearance: If you want more shares, help your audience look good with your content

Causes and Beliefs: If you want more shares, align your brand to a cause that is both real and relevant

High Value: If you want more shares, the more valuable your content needs to be.

Bonus Point: Human Shareability vs. Algorithm Shareability
These ideas above have been all human focused – why do people share.

But, if we want maximum shareability we also need to play into the algorithm’s hands too.

Social media algorithms that decide what content and posts get seen and which don’t also now play a huge factor in how shareable your content can be.

For example, if you post on Facebook with a link, you will get less reach than if you didn’t. If your post gets a lot of engagement – facebook will distribute that post out more and give you higher reach.

So, now the word ‘shareable’ now doesn’t only incorporate when someone physically shares your posts but also includes by how much the algorithms share your posts in people’s timelines too.