Likes, comments, clicks, shares, reach… there are so many metrics on Facebook to measure, it becomes difficult to determine which one(s) are more important than others.
The answer will depend on the end goal of your content. Why did you post that in the first place? Was it to get people off of Facebook and onto your site to purchase a product or download a guide? Are you trying to grow your Facebook page? Are you crowd sourcing information for a new piece of content? Each goal will place a different weight on the metrics above.
There is one metric that I will argue is more important than the others: SHARES.
When a user shares your content, they are essentially working for you, for free. Regardless of what your end goal is, the more people that see your content, the better, right? When a user shares your content to their own audience, people that might not normally see your posts will have your content showing up in their newsfeed. This helps you grow your audience, spread your brand, and gather information from people that are outside of your network.
So, how do we make our posts more shareable?
Factors That Make Content Shareable
Relevance: your post has to be relevant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s relevant to an upcoming event, a news story, a physical location, or a popular meme, as long as your post is relevant.
Humor: funny posts on Facebook might be the most shared content on the internet. People feel good about giving others a chuckle, and hitting the share button is one of the easiest ways to achieve that goal. That said, being funny is difficult, and can go awry if you’re not careful.
Usefulness: another great way to get people to share your content is to actually help them solve a problem. Tips on how to avoid dangerous situations, how to fix the leaking gutter, how to enjoy yourself at a particular location, how to find things when you’re not familiar with the area, are all very useful topics. Useful information is extremely shareable, as others like to help out their friends if they know they’ve had a similar issue or concern.
Benefits Of Sharing Content
Sharing content yourself can help push some of your followers to share your content as well. Sharing quality content builds trust with your fans, and shows them that you don’t only care about your own bottom line – you actually want to help them.
You can’t just stuff your content with keywords anymore and show up at the top of Google Search Results. Your content needs to be quality information in today’s world of SEO. Sharing quality content from your social accounts (whether it is your content or not) builds trust in your fans, and in search engines.
When your fans see you sharing quality content, they will want to share your content too. You have cultivated trust in your fans by providing them with quality information. They pay you back by sharing that information, that they trust is accurate and high-quality, with their own network of fans and friends.
Sharing can also help you fill gaps in your own calendar. You can’t be expected to put together high-quality content all day long, you’ve got other things on your plate. But you don’t want to leave your social accounts high and dry just because you didn’t have the time to curate a piece of useful content. Find someone else’s content and share that.
Ways To Share Content
You can share content in real-time just by clicking the share button on a Facebook post. When you do so, you will have a few options:
Share Post Now (Friends)
Share…
Send as Message
Share on a friend’s timeline
Share to a page
The first, third and fourth options are for sharing from your personal account. For this example, we are going to focus on sharing from your business page.
You can choose the second option “Share…” which basically includes all of these options. When you choose this option you can share the original post (or just the link that the original source posted). You can share it in a group, on an event, on a page that you manage, anywhere really. You also have the ability to add your own commentary to the post at this point.
If you are going to share right to your page, just choose the bottom option, “Share to a page”. The window that pops up will ask you what page you want to share the content to, and will again allow you to add your commentary and choose whether you want to include the original post, or just share the link.
Pro Tip: Schedule A Share
You’ve found some content you would like to share, but you want to schedule that for a Saturday when you’re not going to be in the office. Scheduling a share can be a little tricky, but I’ve got the process down and I’d be happy to share it with you.
Once you have found a post you want to share, copy the permalink (right click on the timestamp, and select “Copy Link Address”). Paste this into the status section on your page as if you were going to share a new blog post that you just wrote.
This is going to pull the original post content into the new post that you are writing. You can now delete the permalink from the status box, add your commentary, and schedule the post to go out in a few hours, tomorrow, or next week.
Creating Sharable Facebook Content For Your Business
The more content you share, and the more shareable your content is, the more people your posts will reach and that can only increase the total engagement with your page. As a result, having an effective sharing strategy in place as part of your social media marketing plan for your business is key!
Interested in more tips for successfully marketing your business on Facebook? Check out the Social Media section of our blog for insight about Facebook algorithm updates, increasing likes and followers, and more.
Want to take your Facebook marketing to the next level? Learn more about shareable content, how to increase your reach, growing your audience, and more by setting up a social media consultation with our Facebook experts!
