This week you will:

• Create a blog post about spreading your ideas with social media and include media.
• Create a blog post on preparing your content for social sharing.
• Practice providing feedback on week 11 blog posts using the intellectual standards.

This week you will create 2 blog posts. First, you will blog about spreading your ideas with social media and include an infographic, photo or video that represents "spreading your ideas with social media"s. Next, you will blog about preparing your content for social sharing.

Next, this week you provide feedback to other learners week 11 posts, using the intellectual standards.

Please remember, before you begin your activities, read and watch this week's topic summary content.

Whenever you learn, let go and have some fun, don't take yourself too seriously.

Creating a positive online reputation is the result of a positive social media campaign using content that works well on each social platform.

Social media marketing is the process of creating content that is tailored to the context of each individual social media platform, in order to drive user engagement and sharing.

Of course, everyone wants their content to go viral, if possible. But, to do that, it has to be engaging, so that people want to share it. Your content must be so good that it makes the user want to tell all of his or her friends about it. Otherwise, you’ll end up with nothing. No shares, no viral content, no traffic back to your blog.

Preparing Your Content for Social Sharing

With the reasons that people share in mind, there are a lot of ways you can shape your content according to what people want to share.

You don’t need to make your content perfect for every social network – in fact, that might be impossible. Plus, there is probably a key network or two that your audience tends to frequent. Don’t stretch yourself too thin; focus where it counts and you will see the benefits.

First, there are some steps you can take to prepare your content for any kind of social sharing. Then, I will go into some quick and detailed ways to prepare your content for social sharing on a social network of your choice.

Shaping Your Content for Social Sharing

There are certain steps you can take to make your content more shareable in general:

Justas Galaburda

1. Make social sharing buttons readily available. If you want people to share, you need to give them a means of doing so! Add social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of your post, or like here at Design School, you could add sharing buttons that follow the reader as they scroll. Don’t forget to make sure your social sharing works on mobile.
2. Write a share-worthy headline. If it doesn’t grip a potential reader, they won’t read on – in fact, 80% of people never make it past the headline. The co-founder of Upworthy, Peter Koechley, has said that in their A/B tests of headlines, they saw variation in traffic of up to 500%. That’s a simply massive amount of influence the headline has on the success of your content, so the title of your post needs to be more than a passing thought.
3. Invite social sharing with a CTA at the end of the article. Don’t underestimate the value of just asking for it. In one study of over 10,000 tweets, the phrase “please retweet” garnered over four times the number of retweets than those that didn’t ask for shares.

Use open graph meta tags to add default images to your page for social media. These snippets of code tell social networks to include a default image when users share something from your website. Facebook posts that include images, for example, are shared over twice as much as those without. If you are running WordPress, Elegant Themes has a great guide to adding these tags manually or with a plugin.

Shaping Your Content for Facebook Sharing

What are Facebook users looking for? Facebook is a very personal social network; we use Facebook to connect with friends and family. Users are looking for content that helps them define themselves. It’s also where we go to waste time. Facebook use accounts for 20% of the time the average internet user spends online, and 2/3 of Facebook’s users consume at least some of their news through the platform.

Catharsis

1. Create a “curiosity gap” with your headline. As Joanna Wiebe from Copy Hackers puts it, “the curiosity gap is the space between what we know and what we want or even need to know.” Have you ever read a headline that evoked more questions than it answered? Copy Hackers used this technique to increase clicks to one of their pages by over 900%.
2. Invite engagement. Engagement is practically the currency of Facebook in these days of limited organic reach. The more people interact with your Facebook posts, the more impressions those posts will earn. Use your headline and image to try and inspire users to click through or like, and you can use your description to try and inspire users to comment; all of these actions will increase your engagement.
3. Double-check your open graph tags. You can use the Facebook debugger tool to test your URLs and ensure they are pulling the image, headline, and description as you intended.

Shaping Your Content for Pinterest Sharing

What are Pinterest users looking for? More than any other social network, the emphasis on Pinterest is on incredible image quality. Pinterest users collect images (which link back to their source site) onto boards they create around their interests. A lot of what users save is inspirational in nature; they are planning their next meal or DIY project, and a lot of pins invite users to “pin now, read later.” The most popular categories on Pinterest are Food & Drink, DIY, Home Décor, and Holidays & Events.

Rachel Ignotofsky

1. Create visuals with Pinterest in mind. Tall images take up more screen real estate on Pinterest than wide images, so if you are shaping your content for Pinterest you should always include at least one tall, attractive image for users to pin. According to social analytics agency Curalate, the sweet spot is an aspect ratio between 2:3 and 4:5.
2. Enable rich pins for your website. If you’ve added meta tags to your website, you can apply with Pinterest to enable rich pins. This means that more information is displayed on pins that come from your website, such as a headline and post description, in addition to the normal description. That’s great, because it means your pins will be longer and occupy more space on the screen. You can test your pages to see if meta tags are working using Pinterest’s validator, and when they are, apply for rich pins here.
3. Invite readers to share to Pinterest with an image hover. Design School, for example, provides three options for social sharing anytime you hover over an image: Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. You can use a plugin like this one to add this functionality if your site is running WordPress.

Shaping Your Content for Twitter Sharing

What are Twitter users looking for? Twitter users are news junkies, looking for breaking information in real time. Beyond a desire for fresh content, they are looking for useful or insightful information about their industry to pass onto their own followers. Specifically, bite-sized statistics or quotes do very well, and headlines are also very important. Alander Wong

1. Add tweetable pull-quotes to your articles. You can emphasize your key takeaways or surprising statistics by off-setting them from the main body of your article and adding an option to tweet the quote. This is a great technique for several reasons. “Click to tweet” links are less easy to overlook than regular social sharing buttons because they literally interrupt the flow of the post with a CTA to share. They also make crafting a clever tweet super easy for your visitors and will help them look smart to their followers, which they are sure to appreciate you for.
2. Tweet your content out multiple times in different ways. Reframing your content will help it appeal to a variety of different audiences, and sharing at different times of day will catch people who weren’t online the first (or second, or third) time.
3. Use Twitter to test-run your headlines. Amanda DiSilvestro shared this technique for A/B testing blog post titles with Twitter several years ago, but it can still be taken advantage of to this day.

Shaping Your Content for LinkedIn Sharing

What are LinkedIn users looking for? LinkedIn users want to be seen as experts in their field. They are on LinkedIn for their own personal and professional development, so they are looking for content they can curate to look like a thought-leader in their field. Power users on LinkedIn heavily use the “groups” portion of the site, where users can create industry-specific communities with discussions.

Finlay Hogg

1. Emphasize powerful statements in your articles. Even if you don’t make them “click to tweet” ready (though you totally should), emphasizing the key takeaways of your article will make it easier for LinkedIn users to quote them when they share to LinkedIn or one of their groups.
2. Repurpose your blog posts into SlideShares. Recycle your best content into a slideshow format that summarizes the main points of your article with more visuals – you can do this quite easily using Canva’s presentation designer tool. Then, embed the SlideShare into your original post, and link back to your blog post from the presentation and description on SlideShare. SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn and presentations shared from the site can embed directly into the LinkedIn feed, making them more engaging than the average share.

Wrapping Up

There are many reasons that people share what they choose to share. A lot of those reasons, however, boil down to a few key motivators – we like to share content that is timely, evokes strong emotions, is highly visual, makes us feel connected with the world, and allows us to put our best foot forward.

Now, I turn to you – what’s your favorite way to shape your content for your social network of choice?

Written by

Adrienne Branson. See Adrienne Branson’s latest posts. Adrienne Branson is a freelance writer and design enthusiast in her 20s. She grew up enthralled by the internet and social media. She loves a well-organized Pinterest board, walking her dogs, and following the music scene in her city.

YOUR Social media Demographics

Use social media to reach people who are interested in your story.

Demographics refer to statistics that describe a group of people. You are look for people who are interested in your personal brand. They include:

• location
• age
• gender
• income
• education level
• religion
• ethnicity
• marital status
• number of children

Example: I want to promote good health with a nutrition blog:

• Gender: slightly more female than male
• Education: relatively educated, but slightly less than Internet average.
• Location: most likely readers are from US, UK, and India.
• Age: average age is about 30. Very few elderly readers.
• Income: likely low to medium due to relatively young age.
• Notice that some of those parameters are more definite than others. The first time you do this, you will have to estimate some demographics. Over time, you should refine these as you learn more about your actual audience.

Not all of these will be relevant. Baring in mind that any message you blog about through social media is publicly visible and will receive instant feedback, there is only one golden rule:

a. I understand "The Art of Crap Detection" to mean…

b. In other words, [elaborate in several sentences]…

c. An example of "The Art of Crap Detection" would be…2. 5 points

Briefly (in a few sentences) summarize accurately the concept of The Art of Crap Detection. 2.5 points

Social Sharing Secrets: 15 Ways to Get More Shares ASAP!

8 Ways to Get More Social Shares Without Annoying Readers

How to Improve Social Sharing by 97% | RazorSocial

What Does It Take to Get Massive Social Shares?

4 Qualities to Give Your Next Blog Post Wings

If you can’t stand seeing social share counters stuck on “0,” then this post is for you. Getting massive social shares is something that most content marketers and bloggers want to accomplish. But, how many people achieve this goal? There was a time when my blog posts earned 10 – 20 social shares and only a handful of comments. But today, it’s a different story.

It all depends on the type of content you create and how you promote it.

A recent survey found that Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content per minute. That’s a lot of content. You need to stand out – or else you’ll get lost in a sea of cute kitten posts. The way that we create and promote content is constantly evolving. Certain marketing activities catch on and become popular, while others fade away.

I’m sure you’ve seen some posts that generated thousands of social shares and thought, “but I can write better content.” Well, maybe.But does it really matter? The truth is that you need to learn what makes some posts more successful than others – why some pieces of content survive the test of time, while others quickly fade away. Let’s look at the 4 ingredients that you need to infuse into your next blog post so that it can generate massive social shares:

1. Create content that evokes curiosity, amazement and surprise.

If you don’t want your Facebook and Twitter feed to look like a graveyard, you’ve got to make the job of sharing and commenting easy for your readers. Evoke curiosity, amazement and surprise in your content.

That’s how your content will stand out from the 2 million blog posts that are published each day. That’s enough content to fill TIME Magazine for 770 years!

Social signals are important. Most people who create content don’t think social shares matter that much, especially for SEO. Well, we’re seeing a lot of attention directed towards social engagement these days. What’s more, social signals can benefit SEO – and this impact is only going to increase.

You already know that your perfect audience is out there. But, what can you do to bring them over to your blog? It’s simple: Create useful content and amplify its reach through social sharing.

Sharing will expose your content to your current audience’s friends, fans, family members, clients, colleagues and customers.

If you look at the chart below, showing the usage rate of various B2C content marketing tactics, you’ll notice that social media content is used 93% of the time. This should tell you something.

People want to connect, share and communicate with you on their favorite social media networks. It’s no longer enough to create content and pray that your audience will magically appear. You have to guide them.

Content that evokes an emotional response always gets massive social shares.

Jonah Berger, in his New York Times bestseller Contagious: Why Things Catch On, simplified sharing to 6 key elements. One of those elements – emotion – is actually THE key factor, because it drives the other 5 elements.

In copywriting, we know that buyers purchase products based on emotional triggers and then justify those purchases with logic. This demonstrates why emotion is such a powerful action driver.

If you want your readers to willingly share your content, your content has to nudge them internally via emotional cues and triggers.

Not all emotions are created equal. For example, emotions of curiosity, amazement and surprise are usually stronger than other emotions.

How do I know? Well, Fractl conducted a really interesting experiment on viral images. They broke down the emotional triggers that made the top images from Imgur (a popular image hosting and sharing site) go viral.

The final results were represented on a modified Plutchik wheel to see which emotions had the strongest impact on viral sharing:

The 5 emotions that prompt people to share content more than others are:

• Curiosity
• Amazement
• Interest
• Astonishment
• Uncertainty

These emotions have more of a positive feel than negative.

Yes, people are often attracted to negative stories. We see this in the popularity of news sites. Negative news always gets people’s attention.

However, people are much more likely to share positive stories. In fact, this study found that good news spreads faster on Twitter and Facebook.

As long as your content evokes positive emotions such as curiosity, people will share it. Here’s an example:

You should also try to infuse emotions of amazement in the content you want to be shared widely. I’ve written a couple of posts like this. Here’s an example:

You already know how to create content that converts. Give it a try – aim to evoke positive emotions like curiosity, amazement and surprise in your content and watch the social shares flood in.

Moreover, positive stories create laugher. And, making people laugh is the top motivation for sharing content.

2. Eliminate friction between sharing and engagement.

Friction is a force that keeps two surfaces from moving freely.

When it comes to getting massive social shares, you have to eliminate the friction between sharing and engagement. Better yet, remove every obstacle that stands between sharing and engagement.

A Wharton business study revealed that there are 4 types of social sharers. These sharers can be further divided into sub-types.

You’ve got to understand that some sharers will read your content and feel excited to share it. But others are apathetic, because it feels like too much work.

In conversion optimization, the general advice is that you should remove the friction behind sharing, by making it as easy as possible for the reader to share your content.

To eliminate the friction and persuade your readers to share your content, make sure that you do the following:

i). Add social sharing buttons: Generally, adding share buttons may seem like pretty basic advice. Yet, many site owners and bloggers have never done it.

You can’t talk about optimizing your share buttons if you don’t have them placed near your content.

3. Don’t beg for shares – just ask.

There’s a difference between begging and asking.

Begging makes you sound desperate. When you sound desperate when asking people to share your content, they’ll most likely ignore it.

Often times, the reason people beg is because they feel that they haven’t measured up.

In the context of online marketing, it could mean that your content isn’t helpful or inspiring.

Asking for shares makes you responsible, because you’re nudging people to take action based on the value that you’ve delivered.

Dan Zarella conducted a study of retweets to determine why some tweets received more shares than others. It turns out simply asking for retweets (or “RTs”) is extremely effective:

When you trust someone, you’ll likely share the post whether they asked you to or not.

That’s why building relationships with your subscribers is a great way to get your content shared.

There are two ways to ask people to share your content:

i). Notify your email subscribers: This is simple. When you publish a new post that you’re proud of, send an email to your subscribers.

You can include a sentence or two beneath the letter. Insert something along the lines of: “If you think that your friends/network would benefit from this post, please share it with them – I’d really appreciate it.”

ii). Mention other people in your content: How often do you do this? It’s important to mention other influencers and bloggers in your industry (even outside of your industry).

It’s a lot easier to get people you’ve mentioned in your post to share the post with their friends and customers. You can reach out to them via email and notify them.

If you mention other people and promote them, they’ll most likely reciprocate by getting your content in front of their audiences.

Don’t beg for social shares. It doesn’t work. But, if you use the two tactics above to ask for social shares, you’ll most assuredly get a lot of them.

4. Get more social impressions with relevant visuals.

I’ve written extensively on how you can use infographics to drive up to 5,000 visitors to your blog per week.

It’s definitely possible, thanks to the power of visual content marketing.

Visual assets such as images, screenshots and infographics attract people more than plain text. It’s why posts that include pictures on Facebook get:

• 104% more comments
• 84% better click through rate
• 54% more likes

These massive engagement rates on Facebook could happen because of what images and other visuals do to the human mind.

According to HubSpot, the human brain processes visuals 60,000x faster than plain text. And, 65% of humans are visual learners. That means that they prefer to learn new things through visual content like videos, infographics, etc., and not plain text (e.g., blog posts).

Brands that are integrating visuals into their marketing get massive social media engagement.

As an example, Burberry, a leading fashion and lifestyle brand from the U.K., created an inspiring Lunar New Year campaign that featured Romeo Beckham. The content generated over 100,000 likes and 13,000 shares.

Burberry’s exclusive image featuring British artist Jessica May Underwood received over 53,000 likes and 270 comments.

To get more people liking and sharing your content, you need to include data and visuals in your posts.

Buffer analyzed a small sample of 100 tweets and found that tweets with pictures generated 18% more clicks, 150% more retweets and 89% more favorites.

However, not just any image will produce the best results for you.

You really don’t need to a be a professional graphic designer, but picking a random image won’t work.

To start with, don’t use stock photos that are irrelevant to your post:

According to Social Media Examiner, if you want your images to draw attention on social networks, you have to find high-quality images that are relevant to your topic and include some sort of persuasive message.

In addition to that, adding a call-to-action to the image itself can raise click-through rates by another 14%.

Here’s a great cheat sheet for the ideal image sizes for each social network:

When you create blog posts, break up chunks of text with relevant images. Here’s how I do it:

Conclusion

Keep creating high quality content, because that’s the hallmark of every successful social media campaign.

Don’t forget to share your best content when your audience members are most active on social media. This will guarantee that you reach the right people at the right time.