Mixing Up The Sharing

I am often asked a number of questions that can all relate back to the bridging question of

“What should I share, how often and how do I do it efficiently?”

This is often secreted in a variety of questions from “How should I approach Social Media?”, “How do I create a good profile and impression?”,  “How do I raise my personal brand?” , “How do I attract more followers” through to “Can I just automate my content sharing?”.

‘Content is King’ is not a new phrase and has increased merit in today’s increasingly online Social world. Getting engagement, growing followers and raising your brand profile, be it personal or company, has value and driving this is greatly down to the content you create and share.

What you share and how you share it will define the persona of the followers and engagers you get. Publish only on historical architecture and those that follow you and engage are unlikely to come from other interest areas. Define what you wish to be known for, what you have expertise and good opinion in and focus in that area. Produce good, interesting, engaging and grabbing content. Be prepared to challenge, but not offend, to argue a point, but be respectful.

Create good content and find somewhere to host it be it a Wordpress Blog which can be done for free (or for a small cost you can brand it – see mine at https://cloudmatters.cloud/), be it on your site as with the https://www.social-experts.net/blog/ Blog or simply using Linkedin Posts to host them for free (eg, https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/ianmoyse/detail/recent-activity/posts/)

So, from creating your own valued content, how should you share it, what is the mixing blend to use? You cannot rely solely on your own created content for your sharing channels, unless you are immensely prolific and have a lot of time on your hands. So you will need to mix your own created focused content in amongst other content to get a good channel mix of shares. A recommended mix I have found works well is the 4:1:1 approach.

·        4 shares informative, relevant content from yourself and others

·        1 share of promotional content (ie for your company, an award win, a customer win)

·        1 share of something light-hearted or amusing / more generic

You are looking to get the attention of, attract engage and edu-tain those following and listening to your content. Blending the content in this way makes it a more natural feel, a mix that stays on brand, but is not bland!

So how can you make this a manageable approach. Many say I must automate all my content shares purely due to the breadth of platforms and content I am able to feed to my channels. When I ask them does it look automated I get a resounding ‘NO, but it must be due to the hours in the day.’

So, I have achieved my goal, a natural looking mix of content feeds, that minimises the time I need to spend, making it an effective channel without eating at my time.

Analysing where my content come from using for example https://www.tweetstats.com/ it shows a real blended mix of sources.

As you can see the key input for my content is my own manual interactions with Twitter from mobile and web clients. Sharing and contributing content easily on the move, in between meetings and in short downtimes to make valuable use of this time.

Following this comes manually configured scheduled sharing, for which I use a mix of Klout.com and buffer.com, allowing me to elect to schedule multiple shares of the same new contact at different times, with different grabber messaging. This is an important sharing strategy; I have seen many create a great piece of content and to share it only once, missing their transient audience. Sharing multiple times is essential, for the same reason that traditional advertisers run an advert at different times, between different programs. You never know when your audience is in the room, so you need to maximise your chance of grabbing their attention.

Around this I recommend tools such as dlvr.it which allows you to automate sharing from blog RSS feeds. With this you can apply rules to filter, add # tags of your choice etc, before the content is auto-reshared on your own social feeds.

You will note that a fair % are shares I make from other sites, such as news sites; for these I suggest subscribing to email alerts or using Google alerts to ensure you are the 1st informed of new good media on your chosen subject of expertise.

I would also suggest checking our rise Global site where I have an automatic list cultivating for influencers in the Cloud community – viewable at https://www.rise.global/the-cloud-social-influencers-power-100 , which creates a weekly share of content that drives good engagement and Social Jukebox which is growing in its content library for you to pull from to spruce up your feeds.

So, the game is on. Increasingly it is important to grow engagement with both new followers, other influencers and prospect customers though social. This often drives them to your web site, to gated content or to share your content, thus allowing Social Selling approaches to be undertaken.

The marketing world is changing rapidly; Buyer dynamics have changed; millennials and Z’s interact and use information and technology differently and attention spans are shorter. Traditional marketing methods such as the newsletter and hard mail approaches are failing to drive the results of prior years. Finding your way in content creation and sharing to cultivate your personal brand is more important than ever.