Shareable content is the gift that keeps on giving, perpetually working to drive referral traffic, net organic links, boost brand awareness, and establish thought leadership for you long after publication.
What is Shareable Content?
Shareable content refers to any type of digital content that is highly likely to get shared organically on social media platforms and other websites in the form of inbound links. Typically, shareable content has certain qualities that motivate audiences to share it with their own networks.
Some key characteristics of shareable content include:
- Value – It offers something useful, helpful, insightful, inspiring or entertaining to the audience. This gives people a reason to share it.
- Emotional trigger – It evokes a strong emotional reaction like humor, surprise, motivation, awe or anger. This emotional response compels sharing.
- Visual appeal – It utilizes engaging visuals like images, infographics, videos or GIFs. Visuals help the content stand out in social media feeds.
- Bite-sized or scannable – It often has a list, step-by-step, or structured format that makes information easy to quickly consume and share.
- Customized for social – It incorporates hashtags, tagging influencers, mentioning brands and more tailored to each platform.
- Timeliness – It taps into trending topics and current events that are hot conversation starters. Capitalizing on collective interest in real-time makes content very shareable.
The main goal of shareable content is to get audiences to endorse it and spread it through their own networks, ultimately driving significant visibility, traffic and backlinks through word-of-mouth on highly influential social platforms.
How Does Shared Content Influence SEO?
Shareable content positively influences SEO rankings in a few key ways:
- Backlinks – Viral content earns more organic backlinks as influencers, brands and websites link back when referencing or sharing the content.
- Lower bounce rates – Compelling content keeps visitors engaged longer, traversing links instead of one-and-done reading.
- Increased on-page time – Shareable content formats lead viewers to stay on the page longer consuming information. More time on site indicates quality content.
- More earned traffic – Likes, shares and reposts of content across social platforms drive referral traffic to original piece.
- Relevance signals – Popular content earns more external engagement metrics like bookmarks, comments, etc. This conveys subject authority and content resonance.
In essence, creating highly linkable and share-friendly content perpetuates a positive feedback loop of viral viewership, backlinks and engagement signals that in turn elevate you further in rankings for your targeted terms.
9 Types of Highly Shareable Content
- List posts (e.g. 25
- Must-Have Kitchen Gadgets)
- Memes (e.g. Trending jokes/funny images with captions)
- Quizzes and polls (e.g. What Type of Entrepreneur Are You?)
- Infographics (e.g. The History of Social Media visualized in a timeline)
- Videos (e.g. A humorous demonstration of a recipe)
- GIFs (e.g. Cute animals being funny)
- Curated content/roundups (e.g. The 5 Most
- Inspirational Books of 2022)
Contests and freebies (e.g. A giveaway for a popular product)
Controversial takes (e.g. An article examining myths about electric vehicles)
The key is to utilize formats that provide value, entertainment, information or an incentive in easily digestible ways tailored for social media users with short attention spans. Types like lists, quizzes and visuals tend to stop the scroll best. I hope these examples illustrate some top-performing kinds of viral-worthy content!
How do SEOs Create Shareable Content?
Gaining a large readership and increased exposure for your content takes more than just publishing quality work and hoping an audience finds it. In the digital era amidst endless competing content, creating shareable content that compels audiences to actively endorse and spread it is key.
Luckily, with deliberate strategy and optimization, you can produce content that taps into human psychology and motivates shares across social networks. Rather than chasing vanity metrics like likes and followers, the focus should be on arming real influencers with content so valuable they feel inclined to share with their niched, targeted audiences. This type of word-of-mouth marketing activates exponential interest in your brand.
So what exactly makes content highly shareable? While no formula guarantees viral success, incorporating these elements dramatically increases content circulation potential, leading to earned links, referral traffic and greater awareness. Here are proven tips for creating compelling, shareable content:
Focus on creating truly helpful, inspiring or entertaining content – boring or overly promotional content won’t get shared.
- Provide genuine value to your audience above all else. Useful tutorials, actionable advice, inspirational stories and hilarious humor often gets shared.
- Avoid overly self-promotional content that focuses too much on pitching your company. Readers can sense the commercial intent and lose interest in sharing.
- Research trending topics and current events, but put your own twist and viewpoint into content instead of repurposing existing ideas. Unique, insightful takes are highly shareable.
Use compelling stats, case studies, examples to make your points and tell a story.
- Incorporate interesting statistics from research reports, surveys and case studies. Numerical data points help convince readers and make content more authoritative.
- Weave in real world examples and success stories that show how tips have helped businesses and individuals. This helps bring concepts to life.
- Build narratives around the people, problems and solutions rather than simply stating dry facts. Storytelling makes content memorable.
Use lists, guides, quizzes – structured content is more likely to get shared.
- Step-by-step guides, cheat sheets, checklists and other structured formats break down advice in easily digestible ways.
- Lists and quizzes pique the interest with numbers in headlines. Readers love to scan and share list-based and quiz-style content.
- Lists should focus on specific tips to accomplish goals vs generic advice. Targeted, tactical advice has higher perceived value.
Ensure content is visually appealing with images, videos, infographics.
- Images grab attention and give readers a mental break from blocks of text, enhancing engagement and recall.
- Infographics cleverly present statistics, flowcharts, timelines and other data visually. They simplify complex ideas for easy sharing.
- Videos and GIFs can demonstrate tips or be used for humorous effect. Interactive content performs exceptionally well.
Write catchy yet descriptive headlines.
- Headlines determine if readers click through content or keep scrolling. Balancing clickbait headlines with accurate descriptors is key.
- Use emotional trigger words like “Unbelievable”, “Controversial” or “Hilarious” to entice clicks but avoid outright exaggerating.
- Ask thought-provoking questions, call out numbers or stats, and target keywords to maximize SEO potential.
How do SEOs Optimize Content for Sharing?
Include relevant hashtags to tap into trending topics on social media.
- Conduct keyword research to identify popular hashtags within your niche on social platforms like Instagram and Twitter.
- Strategically include relevant trending hashtags – but don’t over-optimize as hashtag spam hurts engagement.
- Use hashtags not only for existing trends but to set trends and position your brand as an influencer around topics.
Make key points with pull quotes for easy skimming.
- Pull the most hard-hitting sentences and impactful statistics from your content into bold, graphical pull quotes.
- Breaking up blocks of text with these scannable elements makes the content more share-friendly.
- Position them thoughtfully around natural content pauses for better emphasis.
Use highlighted statistics that stand out.
- Accentuate surprising, attention-grabbing statistics in your content by making them bold, large text and high-contrast colors.
- Not only emphasize stand alone stats but also those incorporated into textual facts.
- Ensure the statistical significance is clear at a glance to motivate social media shares.
Add share buttons and make it easy for readers to share quickly.
- Eliminate friction keeping readers from sharing by prominently featuring social media share buttons.
- Optimize their placement in natural break points within content following compelling points.
- Use horizontal share bars with multiple platforms instead of singular buttons for each platform.
- Test placements to determine which perform best.
Is There Content I Shouldn't Share?
Certain types of content are typically not very suitable for sharing or going viral:
- Blatant sales pitches – Content that is overly promotional or reads like a straight product sales letter generally does not get shared organically. It needs to offer more helpful or entertainment value.
- Overly corporate or formal content – Usually content with boring business jargon or strictly serious tones does not spread on more casual social platforms. It fails to connect emotionally.
- Outdated or stale content – Even evergreen content needs freshening up over time especially if it covers trends, stats or events that become dated. Out of touch content isn’t worth sharing.
- Poorly formatted content – Walls of text, tiny hard-to-read fonts, cluttered layouts full of ads and more can make content viscerally unappealing to share even if the information is good.
- Non-visual content – On highly visual platforms like Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, plain text status updates typically fall flat. Eye-catching visuals are critical.
- Narrow scope content – Niche content tailored just for experts in a field vs a more general interest audience can limit potential shares to only that niche.
- Negative or rant-style content – While controversy can gain shares if presented thoughtfully, typically just complaining or venting tends not to spread positive word-of-mouth.
The key is providing broadly appealing, visually engaging content with a positive tone focused on serving the reader in some way – not just the brand. This makes others want to share it within their own networks.
Spread the Word: Why Shareable Content is Your Secret Weapon
After reading this post, you have a complete blueprint for creating highly shareable content tailored to earn backlinks and amplification. From choosing topics that provide value and tap into emotions, to utilizing winning formats like lists and quizzes, to optimizing with share buttons and eye-catching visuals – you now know exactly how to produce content primed for virality.
But why does this matter so much? Shareable content is leveraging human psychology to activate unpaid brand ambassadors to organically spread your messages across their platforms. Instead of traditional advertising, it powers mouth-to-mouth recommendation – one of the most powerful marketing tactics.
Each like, share, repost and link acts as a credible implied endorsement making more audiences take notice while expanding your influence. It establishes you as an authoritative industry voice as audiences see real people engaging with your work.
So before you hit publish on any piece of content, ask yourself – would my audience genuinely be compelled to share this if they came across it? If so, you have successfully created a secret weapon that keeps on giving in the form of referral traffic, links and perpetual visibility – not just a one-and-done read.
Want to explore the possibilities of tapping into this type of hyper-shareable content and link building strategy. Get in touch with our team for a free SEO consultation.
