Encouraging customers to share your content
One of the key characteristics of social media is sharing. People are sharing links, photos, videos, podcasts, reviews, jokes, useful blog addresses, interesting articles and so on.
They are doing this freely themselves. They are not waiting for a remote editor to decide what they should read which is how traditional media works. They are editing content for themselves. This is the people’s media.
The challenge for companies is to find ways of encouraging their customers/stakeholders to share their content and spread it.
Nate Elliott from Forrester makes some interesting points in his piece and highlights the tools that can be added to web sites to facilitate this process.
But the important point to remember here is that this is not just a case of giving your customers the tools to share your content with their friends and peers. How many web sites do you see with an RSS feed slapped on it and you know honestly that no one is going to spend time subscribing to it because the content is so irrelevant to their actual needs.
The point is that you need to create content that is genuinely – and I mean genuinely what your customers will value. If you do that then, the sharing tools will really help you gain valuable results. Great content is the fuel for driving social media success.
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