Creating compelling content – in a beautiful infographic for example – is only of value when it is seen by or shared with as many people as possible. As social media matures, it is no longer enough to post that infographic on your website and trust that your search engine optimization team will add the right magic to impact search results and reach your target audiences. Today social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are enabling a new, more sophisticated, human-led system of connecting, organizing and distributing data. As a result, companies now need to integrate social media features into their online content to facilitate sharing and increase distribution of valuable content across these networks.
For well over a decade people have been starting their online experience on their search engine of choice, such as Google or Microsoft’s Bing. Companies selling products or services became wise to this behavior, and quickly invested billions of dollars on search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) techniques to help their online content compete for a premium spot on the first or second page of search results. These search strategies became so successful that companies would adjust their investment based on the timing of a product launch or in the event of a crisis to manage reputation. The more money invested in specific keywords, the more likely a company’s content will appear in the top pages of the search results. This massive growth of enterprise-generated web pages, optimized for search, is now diminishing the value of the search results, driving online users to social networks of “human search engines.” Known as “curators of content,” they gather, refine and serve up relevant information to their communities of interested readers, subscribers, followers or friends.
These curators of information are typically passionate consumers, former journalists or specialists on a particular subject, such as marketing, food, cars, health, technology or the environment. Curators invest their time, for free, aggregating, analyzing and editing the best sources of information on the web, and then share only the content that is most valuable to their specific audience within their social network. As a result, status updates on Facebook, tweets on Twitter or even e-mails with links to curated content are becoming the new entry points for many users accessing and connecting to relevant information online.
Google and Bing recognized this growing trend towards online users navigating the web through “shared media” on social networking sites and added social search features to their results. For example, Bing has a social search feature, and Google sources content from Twitter updates, Facebook fan pages, and blogs within a segment of its search engine. So now companies must not only think about optimizing content for search, but also facilitate the sharing of content across social networks.
Optimizing content for social media sharing is a technical process in which RSS, e-mail or other social media buttons are integrated into a webpage or offered alongside an article, video or other digital content to inspire users to instantaneously and systematically disperse the information via Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. These icons allow people to share links to articles, images and video on the web – adding to the impact on social search as well as the distribution across multiple social networking platforms.
Online publishers and news sites recognize the benefits of integrating social features such as the Facebook or Twitter buttons into their sites. First, it enables readers to instantly grab a link of the article and post it into their status update, which then broadcasts the article’s headline to a potentially new audience of readers. Second, the shared links drive traffic from the curator’s status update directly to the online news properties. Finally, these features offer a sophisticated way to track the most shared articles, and measure the most valuable content, based on the number of times it is shared via a tweet, status update, e-mail or RSS subscription.
In addition to enabling your content to be shared, it is also important to allow curators to extract individual elements. It’s no longer acceptable to lock up an infographic in a 50-page PDF, or secure a video on a company website. Presenting information in a flexible way that allows curators to extract and share the elements that interest them will increase the probability of sharing. Don’t be afraid to let people “mash-up” your information with content from other sources, or to annotate it with their own comments. For example, enable the user to edit the infographic, and to select the bit that is most relevant to their audience.
True, some people may still access your graphic directly on the company website, and many will still come across it through a Google search, but an increasing number of people will receive it through their social network of choice, most likely a Facebook or Twitter feed.
The benefits of optimizing content for social media sharing are clear in terms of increased distribution of information. In addition, the opportunity to track and – most useful of all – measure the number of clicks, shares, retweets and subscribers can determine the effectiveness of a company’s communications investment.
Rachelle Spero is a Director in Brunswick’s New York office and specializes in digital and social media communications. She is also an adjunct Professor for New York University’s Public Relations and Corporate Communications Graduate Program.