Shareable content increases the awareness of your brand and helps to drive up revenue for your company. With 50% of content getting less than 8 shares, how can your small business create super shareable content?

My guide explains what you need to do to get your customers to share your content.

Attention-grabbing headlines

Your headline is so important that 59% of your customers won’t even read your content before sharing it.

In order to grab your reader’s attention you need a headline that follows Russ Henneberry’s definition: “A headline is a clear, tightly written promise that is made with enough words to make a promise, but no more words than necessary.”

If you’re struggling to create a headline that will draw your customers in, try using Headline Generator to give you some ideas.

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Be short, simple, and scannable

If you get your audience to click onto your article you still need to be conscious of their attention span if you want them to share it. When writing your content think SSS:

• Short: Say what you want using as few words as possible
• Simple: Web content should have a reading age of 9. You can use a tool like Readability Formulas to check the reading age of your content
• Scannable: Your customers should be able to pick out the points they need just by skimming over your content

Make sure that your content is useful

According to The New York Times, 90% of people will assess how useful a piece of content is before they share it. A great way of making your content is to make it actionable. Following the actionable content pyramid below will add more value to your content. It will also increase the chances of your customers sharing it.

Be conscious of time

Nearly 90% of your viewers will watch only 10 seconds of your video content. By the time you get to 5 minutes less than 10% of your viewers are still watching.

Credit: Content Marketing Institute

Avoid hard marketing

Your viewers don’t want to be hit with an infomercial and will not share your content if the overriding message is a marketing push for your small business. Your customers want to be engaged and entertained.

However, that is not to say that you can’t entertain, engage, and entice your customers to buy your products. One of the most successful examples of a video that was shared to virality is DollarShaveClub’s, Our Blades Are F***ing Great…

Work for your shares

It’s very rarely enough to just follow the guidelines if you want your content to be widely shared. In order to get your content seen by as many people to see your content as possible you have to work at it:

• Add in a call-to-action. Add a CTA which offers your customers an incentive to share your content, such as a discount on your products. Sniply let’s you add a custom CTA to any web page, helping you to get a greater return on your content when it is shared
• Make it easy to share your content: If you want your customers to share your content then make it simple for them to do so. AddThis makes it easy for your audience to share your content to over 300 social networking and bookmarking sites, supports more than 70 languages and is free to add to your website if was built using Shopify
• Work with other websites: Offer a content share and exchange with relevant websites so that you can get also your content in front of their audiences
• Team up with an influencer: There are two types of influencer: micro and macro. Micro-influencers have audiences under 100,000 macro-influencers have audiences over 100,000. Establish which influencer works best for your small business then put your content in front of their uniquely engaged audience to increase the chances of it being shared

In Conclusion

Getting your content shared puts your small business in front of a wider audience. This offers the potential for you to increase your customer base. However, getting your audience to share your content is difficult.

Following the advice in this guide will help you to create super shareable content. This should help you to generate even greater profits for your small business.

Kayleigh Alexandra is a content writer for Micro Startups — a site dedicated to giving through growth hacking. Visit the blog for your latest dose of startup, entrepreneur, and charity insights from top experts around the globe. Follow us on Twitter @getmicrostarted.