In BCAMA’s Fall 2013 magazine edition, Cameron Uganec (@CameronU), Director of Marketing and Communications at HootSuite, discusses the essentiality of shareable content and the elements that make content viral.

 

In his article, Cameron states that businesses today can no longer push their messages to their audiences – instead, they have to pull their consumers in with captivating, valuable content. Marketers have to create content that help their audiences build relationships (with others, not solely with their brands) and evoke emotions. Moreover, marketers have to ensure their messages are succinct and suitable for the social medium. 

 

Cameron’s suggestions are based on various research findings. His advice which states that marketers should produce content that helps consumers strengthen their relationships with others is based on a New York Times Customer Insights Group study. The study examined the main factors that encourage people to share content and discovered that relationships played the most prominent role. The finding indicated that people share content mostly to entertain others, foster relationships, and promote causes or brands they care about.

 

In addition to the New York Times Customer Insights Group study, Cameron also based his suggestion on a study in the journal of Psychological Science which revealed that people are more likely to share content when it provokes emotional reactions. The study showed that people tend to share content when the article inspires, amuses, or touches them.

 

After reading Cameron’s advice, we couldn’t agree any further. In our cases, content that’s more relevant to our audience (comments, favorites, and retweets) has generated the most interactions. Moreover, content that’s pertinent to our readers generally culls 3 times more traffic than irrelevant articles. That’s why we primarily write on topics regarding the latest product launches, Google updates, commercials (ahem - Van Damme), and web design. Why? Because our audience mostly consists of marketers, businesses, and professionals who are intrigued by digital marketing advancements and the like. Moreover, in addition to simply encapsulating a product release, we also give tips on how marketers can leverage the roll-out. For instance, in our recent “Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Splits: What Brands can Learn from Volvo’s Commercial” article, we not only depicted the commercial and what it tries to achieve, but also gave 3 advices on how brands and advertisers can learn from this commercial. This allowed us to not only entertain our audience, but also give them valuable information that can benefit their own marketing campaigns profoundly.

 

Communication channels in today’s business world are no longer vertical, where a company sends a message and the audience can’t respond - it’s now lateral. Consumers today can read an article and share it with the rest of the world within minutes. This in turn creates a beneficial opportunity for businesses as they can economically advertise marketing campaigns by producing one piece of captivating content. That said, this can only be accomplished if you’ve created the right content for your audience. Hence, it’s vital for companies to create valuable content for their audiences as it can help their growths tremendously in the long run.