Your social media flops for a lot of reasons, but it usually comes down to a lot more than your original content marketing effort.
Let’s keep this short and simple: if your content isn’t getting shared, it doesn’t mean you’re publishing bad content. Although, it might. Social media flops much more often than it succeeds. Sometimes there’s an arsenal of great information behind a crappy title. Here’s a short list of simple reasons why your content isn’t getting shared.
1. The title stinks. At least 50% of a person’s decision to share is based on a title, which is supported by the fact that Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, reports that there is “effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.” So basically a vast majority of people don’t even click an article to read it before retweeting a great headlined article.
2. The content is thin. People share long content – thick as your grandfather’s beard content – they think they’re actually passive aggressively bookmarking for themselves by posting to their own pages. On that note, when the content is too thick, many people may only bookmark and may never read to the end. This is a hazard if your goal is getting readers to a call to action.
3. Your social media flops because there are no graphics. Call me a hippie for adding art to all of our content, but the data scientists agree. People share content with graphics. And, when you have graphics, you can include them in your social media posts. According to Eric Enge at Stone Temple, images double responses for larger brands, and for smaller brands, it will get you “5 to 9 times as many Retweets and 4 to 12 times as many favorites than you will if your tweets don’t include an image.” The better the graphics (aka not stock photography) the better. Have any good doodlers on your team? Can you recruit a designer into your social media efforts? It will be worth it.
4. Nobody knows it exists. If you don’t search-optimize content, then it’s dead in the water a month from now, and it’s at the bottom of the sea a year from now. Search-optimized content lasts forever, and when people find it a year from now as a result of their search query, they’ll share it on their own – keeping the good vibes flowing.
5. You haven’t brought anything to the table. Long content, short content, well-illustrated content, none of those points matter if the content you’re publishing is lousy. Invest in a content expert. Don’t attempt to turn your developers into writers or your daughters into “social media experts.”
6. There’s no voice. Even though I haven’t told you about my Goldendoodle (his name is Napa, and he blogs) or how my husband was once a geography bee champ, you probably have a pretty good idea that I may be a nice person who knows content and writes articles like this to support other marketers and businesses. Posts don’t need a long-winded story to have a voice. They just need to be personal and suggest the author is an expert – rather than an intern who researched a topic and regurgitated it as best as he could for your blog.
If your social media flops more often than you’d like, and your content flops even more, you’d probably like to work with Lantern to develop a long-term strategy for your company blog, get in touch.
