Content marketing drives brand messaging, showcases your propositions and thought leadership. The tricky part about content marketing is that is we're all selfish content consumers - your audience isn't interested in your problems; they're interested in their problems; you engage and grow your audience with content that's meaningful and relevant to the issues they're concerned with. But you shouldn't be the only voice in your social channels. Most marketers recommend sharing other people's content 80% of the time, and your own 20% of the time. So, if you're doing things right, you're sharing a lot of content. The difficult thing is, not all content is worth sharing, and even less may be relevant to your audience.So what do you do?
One approach we recommend is to share the best content multiple times. This gives the best stories, advice, and insights the most reach, will prompt the best engagement from your community, and will help you connect with influencers who are sharing your content. In this post I'm going to lay out for several strategies we use to identify and re-share the content our community likes the most, as well as some alternative strategies. In addition, I'll tell you how identifying that content can help you connect with influencers to boost your content marketing reach even more.
A Word About Content Reach
I get this question a lot, "Why share something again that you've already shared once?" And the answer's simple, reach.
You may have 10,000 fans or followers, but they don't typically see everything you publish, only a subset of your fans and followers will see any given post at any given time. If those fans or followers engage with it, like it, and share it, then more people will see it. If a lot of people share, the post goes viral. Most posts don't go viral. Many of your posts won't be seen by a number of your fans and followers.
By sharing posts again, on different days, and at different times during the day, you can reach different subsets of your fans and followers.
Tip 1: Discover Your Most Popular Content
So how do you know which content is worth re-sharing? With social media content, past performance is often the best predictor of future success. You have to measure you content performance to see which posts generate the most engagement. You're looking for posts that have the most shares, retweets, likes, comments, and clicks. Most social media management tools offer some form of analytics on the content published through those tools. Dedicated social media analytics software such as Fan Page Karma, Quintly, Simply Measured or others can also provide you metrics on all content you publish. Of course, the analytics or insights pages provided by the social media networks themselves will also provide information that can help you identify your most engaging content.
Buffer for Business provides some of the best content analytics available. You can search for posts that have the most interaction overall:
You can also search for content that has the most interactions of a specific type to find content that gets the most clicks, versus and the most shares and so forth.
Tip 2: Re-Share That Content
There are lots strategies for how and when you choose to re-share content. We've listed some of our re-sharing strategies, and some other popular strategies below:
- Re-share content as part of your normal content mix. Pick a few of your most popular posts from the past to re-share each day or week.
- Have a throwback Day: This is very popular. Pick a day, throwback Thursday is probably the most popular, dedicated to sharing the most popular content over a given period. You can do this every week, every month, or on some other schedule. We do a throwback Friday every 3rd week to re-share the most popular content from the previous three weeks.
- Re-share the week's most popular content on the weekend. Different people might be on your social channels on the weekend. Also, people have more time to read on the weekend. Your fans might read something on the weekend that they didn't feel they had time for during the week.
- Late Friday and weekend re-share. Some people stay off of social channels, or only lightly engage, at the end of the week and on the weekends. We share new content published on our channels between Friday afternoon at 1:00pm through Sunday night over the course of the following work week.
- Re-share content from dead times. Sporting events such as the Super Bowl, elections returns, television events such as the Grammys, or other events can consume social audiences leaving your content untouched. Consider re-sharing that content at other times when there isn't a distraction. Better yet, share content related to the event in question near the time of the event!
- Anytime something is relevant or viral. If you share a piece of content related to a hot topic, and the topic remains hot, jump on that train and re-share. Odds are you will reach new people and engagement will go up!
In the end it's up to you to choose what sharing methodology to implement. We do, however, have some recommendations you should always follow when re-sharing content:
- Share time sensitive content in a timely way. If your content is about an upcoming event, or trending topic, it may only be relevant for a short time. Re-share it while it's relevant.
- Give content a least a little time between shares. Re-sharing the same content too frequently can make fans and followers tune out, or worse, stop following you. Re-shared content should be mixed with and surrounded by other content. At least some of that content should be fresh.
- Always re-share different days, and at different times. That is how you will reach different segments of your audience than you reached previously.
Tip 3: Connect with Influencers that Share Your Content
The other thing that goes hand-in-hand with identifying your most engaging content, is identifying influencers who are liking, commenting, and sharing your content. Influencers have a large social media audience in their own right, and when they engage with your content, their audience sees it, increasing your reach to their audience.
Identifying those influencers is the first step in building a relationship. Once you know who's sharing your content, you can follow them, share their content, and send them articles, updates, and other information that they might be interested in sharing. As they share your content on their network, you get that additional reach.
Conclusion
Re-sharing the best content makes your overall content mix better, and your social media channels more compelling. You need to be measuring your content metrics for engagement to find which content your audience likes the best. Once you do, you can implement a strategy for re-integrating your most popular content into your daily, weekly, and monthly content mix. In addition, you can identify, and build relationships with influencers who can help share your content with even more people online.
Over to you
How do you identify your most popular content? And how do you re-share it? Let me know in the comments.
