Page 38 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

(because that is where most of the research is occurring). So you need to be
culturally sensitive to the unique needs of your region and target audience.

I provide sound advice based on the experience of experts and trusted
research, but you should always apply critical thinking, your own data, and
personal intuition about your customer needs to create a plan that is exactly right
for you and your business.

Breaking through the wall

First, the bad news: In general, people don’t want to share your content!
Research shows that people typically don’t share content they’re reading on

the web, even “great” content.1 For example, a large study of social transmission
across millions of Twitter accounts revealed that the majority of users are
passive information consumers and rarely forward content to their network.

In fact, an average Twitter user retweets only one in 318 content links they
receive. Facebook reports that just one-half of one percent of those who see a
Facebook post share it.2 These sobering numbers suggest that actively finding
and nurturing that miniscule number of the most active users is critical to
spreading your information on the web.

The popularity of an individual or brand, the nature of the content, and the
size of the audience alone are not accurate predictors that people will overcome
this passivity and “click” to share.

Therefore, in order to become an effective content-igniter, you must not only
create content and build an audience but also employ strategies to overcome user
passivity and systematically find individuals predisposed to love and share the
content you’re creating. This is perhaps the most overlooked imperative in
digital marketing today.

The psychology of sharing

There’s a lot of hype about what makes content work in a way that people want
to share it. Instead of buying into the hype, let’s focus on reliable research that
can provide accurate insight and even competitive advantage as you seek to
overcome passivity and build shareability into every piece of content.

If there is any organization on earth that wants to attract page views, it’s a
newspaper, so let’s pay attention to what one of the most important newspapers