Content Sharing: How It’s a Marketing Tool for Social Media

AOL and Nielsen recently released a study which showed that nearly a quarter of all social media messages, and about half of all industry-specific social messages contain links to content. There is definitely a direct relationship between content sharing and brand messaging — a staggering 60% of content-sharing messages mention a brand or product name. At 66%, email remains the primary sharing tool, but social-networking platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, are quickly taking over due to their pervasiveness.

So what is the significance of these numbers? They show that marketers need to use content to become involved in the social conversation — content is what fuels the social media boom, and is therefore key to any marketing buy.

So how can a business take advantage of these tendencies? Here are some tips to maximize the benefits of content sharing:

Blogging: Use relevant keywords to create brief, engaging headlines. Also, you should obviously strive to make your content interesting, but above all, it is most effective to write about a recent topic, or to offer a unique perspective or opinion — readers want to be the first to share in their social circle. Additionally, it has been found that new blogs posted around 7am are most susceptible to sharing.

Facebook: Post every other day for maximum sharing. Avoid technical jargon, and complex phrases — people prefer to read well-written, but simple sentences. When deciding when to make a post, accommodate to the times of highest Facebook activity: early evenings and weekends. Also, try to include graphics or video — these have been shown to generate the most links and sharing.

Twitter: Keep your tweets short and grammatically-correct, but avoid using abbreviations or special terms that may be too technical. Google key words that are effective in marketing (“you”, “free”, “new”, and “great” are a few), and include them in your tweets for best re-tweeting. Also, the best time to promote new blog posts on Twitter is around 10am, weekdays.

About the study: Findings are based on Nielsen’s NM Incite Social Media Monitoring tools, Online Behavior Panel and Attitudinal analysis, tracking more than 10,000 social media messages; and on a survey of more than 1,000 Nielsen Online panel members for 10 consecutive days, December 14-23, 2010.

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