7 Inventive Ways to Create Shareable Content for Your Industry
Do you sometimes feel the pressure of coming up with fresh and shareable content for your audience? Brainstorming doesn’t always yield the results we are looking for, as we end up frustrated and with nothing to say. Sometimes content isn’t right under your nose. Your best ideas for engaging and shareable content might take some mining.
Here are seven ideas to find content that will be shared all over social media.
Feel Around for Industry Pressure Points
People are always interested in the challenges they face in their own industries. It doesn’t matter if you work in that particular industry directly. What does matter is that you can offer authoritative insight into the problem, back up your insight with facts and provide a solution to the problem.
There are several ways you can go about finding those industry pressure points. Speak with colleagues and customers to gain insight on their biggest problems. Use a former client to create a case study, detail the problem the client faced and how this problem was overcome. Your audience will appreciate your content for themselves, and they will also want to share it with others whom they know are facing the same issue.
Rebecca Watson of Content Marketing Institute wrote an awesome article about content optimization that resonates with businesses in various industries. What’s unique about her take is that she took the opportunity to bring up issues that her audience may not have even considered a problem.
Scan the Comments
If your social media page or blog is pretty active and you typically get several comments on your posts, check there for new topics. Commenters can often bring up very relevant points that you may have skipped. Maybe a tangent conversation will spawn in the comments section and you can use this as seed for new content.
Even if your blog or social networks aren’t filled with comments, you can use the same technique on blogs or social networking sites in your industry. Do a hashtag search on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ to see what people are talking about.
Develop Your Punch Line
Hit your readers hard and fast with a short but powerful blog post or social media update. If you can say something substantial in just a few sentences, your readers will instantly impacted.
They’ll also be very likely to share your content on their social networks. Spend your time developing a single idea, and avoid going off on a tangent. Keep your thoughts concise. It may take some practice, especially if you tend to be longwinded, but you’ll notice an increase in engagement as you get better.
Seth Godin is a master at the art of short, witty and thought-provoking blog posts. His deep and insightful business advice is bite-sized and easily shareable.
Make a List
People love making and reading lists, especially idea lists. Lists provide small tidbits of information in a form that is easy to consume. Top 10 lists used to be most common, but nowadays almost any number greater than two will do just fine. You’ll find that your list content is easily the most commented on and shared.
Arizona Family Dental used this technique in their blog titled, “21 Famous People Who Had Cosmetic Dentistry” to take advantage of industry trends. The article features great before and after photos of celebrities.
Get Fuel from Reader Questions
This is along the same vein as finding industry pressure points, but works for both B2B and B2C businesses just the same. If there’s a question you find yourself answering over and over, it may be time to turn that question and answer into a content topic. Because it’s been asked so much, you’re already aware that the topic is pretty popular amongst your audience. This means that it’s probably something that is searched for often. Once your content is published, you’ll become part of the solution, and your content will show up when people search for your topic.
Northwest Edible Life makes it a habit to not only use readers’ questions for blog topics, but they also post readers’ questions to their Facebook page for their followers to give feedback on. It’s proven to be an effective strategy for their brand.
Look Through Your Sent Mail
The co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, suggests going through your sent mail to find content. Your sent mail is full of ideas, information about your company to prospects, sales processes and even answers to questions. You may find your outbox to be a goldmine of ideas for content on your blog or social media sites.
Make Your Content Available to Share
Make it easy for readers to share your content. There are several scripts and plugins you can use to add share buttons to your content pages. When readers have to work to share an article, they are largely unlikely to share it at all. Sharing buttons literally put your content in front of hundreds or thousands of people per share in an instant.
What techniques do you use to come up with fresh content that evokes engagement and sharing?
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