Creating content is easy, but creating engaging content that leads people to talk about it and share it out, is another story. Everyone knows that sharing a content out organically is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. It also helps to improve the customer engagement too, but one question remains:
Is there a psychological thing we need to know what drives people to share online?
Imagine if you can get hold of the formula behind it, then I bet you can easily viral out your content each time you’re distributing it, can’t you? From the formula, you would know how to develop the right content, the position of images, types of colours to use, the emotional sentiment to be taken advantage of and so on.
How to create a cool, viral-worthy content then? To answer the question, let’s not go too far. Let’s look and evaluate ourselves on why we share certain articles, videos, infographics, podcasts or perhaps GIFs out to our friends instead.
What type of posts we normally share? By default, we love to share posts that are positive, personalised, informative, interesting, funny, uplifting, relatable, inspirational, give us hope, provoking, sentimental, sad or excite us. Posts that can touch, spark or stir people’s emotion are those we share the most. They also want to share a post which content they are seeing it for the first time, something new to them and loving it all the way. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Why do we share it actually? We share it because we want our network of friends to see it. We want them to gain knowledge out of it, learn from it, tell others about it, see their reactions after seeing it and how they’d respond to it. Are they agreeable to it or otherwise? We want to see who is on the same side and join the movement, and vice versa. Some of us are strangers in developing content ourselves thus, once we see other people’s content that portrays similar belief to what we are believing in and darn interesting, we will definitely share it out.
What type of posts that we avoid sharing? Boring, plain and copy-paste content. They will also skip your post if they’re seeing you are talking about nothing else but you, you and you. These types of content normally come from boring people, and boring brands too. We don’t want to be associated with these negative aura, making our friends to see us as boring as the content shared. Too professional content is another type of content we avoid at all cost. What’s with everybody, working hard to look too professional or too perfect? Do you think people like it when you are proclaiming that you’re a champion in your own field? Well, here’s the truth. Self-proclaiming sucks. It’s not only boring, your brand will look rigid, too serious, absolute fake and making people yawn. There’s no freakin’ way we are sharing this too.
Which content people prefer to see? They prefer to see something authentic. Something real. Something human. They want to see the real you, the fragile you who are prone to making mistakes too. Behind your perfectness, they want to see the sad part of you, the crying part of you too, the problematic side of you too. Regardless of your type of content whether they are articles, videos, infographics, images or even podcasts, now you know how to custom your content to fit these criteria in your journey to make your content shareable.
Any other elements that make people share your post? There is another one actually. It is your caption. What you are writing at the caption of the post plays a critical role too. It has to be cheeky, casually-sound, indirectly inviting the people to click on the content posted and wrap those sentences with some jokes, sadness or any other emotionally triggered words.
