3 Quick Tips To Create Shareable Content

A few minutes on a Tuesday night to learn:

• How to think about short-form content vs. long-form content and its affect on WOM
• How to bake social loops into your content strategy
• How to find your competitors' top content

1. Short-Form vs. Long-Form Content’s Impact On Word Of Mouth

Great content is driven by word of mouth.

But by both URL and IRL word of mouth.

And each is driven by different content lengths.

1. Short Form content drives URL word of mouth through shares, saves, and retweets.

In regards to short-form content, typically, people share what resonates.

Think of a Twitter thread about content marketing, an IG reel about buying businesses, or a TikTok about meal prepping.

These pieces of content create small hits of dopamine that result in sharing, which drives awareness.

So, when I create short-form content, I think about:

• What will create that moment of delight
• How will I make the content resonate

2. Long-Form content drives URL and IRL word of mouth.

For example, Top Gun: Maverick had a record-setting box office weekend where it did over $100M.

As impressive as that is, what’s more impressive is that it did $86 million in the second weekend, which was only a 36% drop in sales.

In Top Gun’s case, word of mouth added mileage to the content.

Because long-form content drives both URL and IRL word of mouth at scale.

This is also the case for shows like Hot Ones, Cold as Balls, Hard Knocks, etc.

So, when I think of long-form content, I think about:

• How do I transfer information in a way that it's entertaining
• How do I make it so good that it starts a conversation

The ideal state is to manufacture short-form content to drive WOM through a platform and create long-form content that drives targeted word of mouth (friend to friend).

2. Creating Social Loops

Social loops create an infinite potential for your brand or product’s awareness.

Because social loops plaster billboards for your brand or product on customers' feeds without paying for it.

It’s essentially real estate you don’t pay for but earn.

And converts current customers into marketers.

So, how do you bake social loops into your content strategy?

Personally, I found the best recipes to be twofold: Frictionless x Incentivized.

Make it very easy to share your product and give simple instructions.

Second, encourage the customer to share your product or brand in exchange for X (you determine X).

Ideas:

• Incentivize customers to post your product (product for post)
• Make it easy for them to share your content (Embed an easy way to share your content)
• Create content for them to share (create content they can download and share but watermark it with your logo)
• Challenges (Create contests and challenges where customers can partake and win)
• Create a campaign (Create a branded hashtag or campaign around a specific theme)

The last portion is to think about social loops in two ways:

Consistent social loops = A tested and proven way of generating UGC.

Scaled social loops = Creating campaigns that aim to generate large amounts of UGC at once.

3. Find Your Competitor's Top Content

The ideal piece of content is highly searched and highly shared.

Here’s how to find that:

1. Use Sparktoro to find websites and publications that your audience visits.
2. Use Ahrefs to find those websites’ high-volume keywords and blog posts.
3. Use BuzzSumo to find which posts are heavily shared on social media.

Then take these pieces of content and give them an upgrade.