Sharing is caring. The old phrase that many of us heard as kids is now one that I hear almost every day with regards to inbound marketing. Why? It’s simple and serves as a powerful reminder that for inbound marketing to work, you must create great content and then make it readily available for your target personas to consume. The latter is where sharing comes in.
So how do you get people to share your content? This can be accomplished in many ways, but we always recommend starting with your coworkers. While this may sound simple, many actually find it difficult to get coworkers to share content. (I know, it seems so easy – it just takes the click of a button, right?). Nonetheless, excuses range from: they’re just not that active on social media, they’re too busy, they forgot, or they simply don’t know what to say when they post it. As a result you’ve got to make it as easy as possible for them.
Here are four tips for making it easy for coworkers to share your content:
This could be a blog post, a new piece of premium content, whatever you want to share at that moment. Just make sure you’re specific on what you want them to share. Asking them to simply “share content!” won’t get you nearly as many shares.
This means you’re providing them with the actual link to the blog post, and you’re also saying click here to share it on Twitter, click here to share on LinkedIn, etc. Everything is set up for them so all they have to do is literally “click here.”
This is an important one. We’ve discovered that many coworkers genuinely want to help out… but they feel somewhat silly just posting a “random” post or piece of content. Or, they feel like it doesn’t matter to their followers. When you give them a sentence of context to include, they are MUCH more inclined to share it. We’ve seen this first-hand within our company. An example, “Don’t know what to say when sharing on LinkedIn? Try something like, ‘this is a great post for anyone trying to decide if inbound marketing is a good investment or not.’”
Be sure to follow-up and let them know the results of their efforts. When people actually see how their sharing impacted the blog in a positive way, they’ll be happy to continue to do so. Some simple stats about how that specific post was viewed by twice as many people as your average posts, or how it generated X amount of leads, or how many more downloads that page received will do the trick. Nothing too in-depth.
Along with the steps above, it may help to remind them why sharing is so important and even what’s in it for them. Not only does sharing benefit the blog, it can also help with their own personal branding efforts. In addition, if you can get some coworkers involved with specific blog posts, even if it’s just adding their two-cents into an already written post, they’ll likely be more motivated to share it.
Sharing your content is a must… and getting your coworkers to share doesn’t have to be difficult. Make it easy for them with the steps above and they’ll happily oblige.