Page 54 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

history, you can create relationships and build trust with people far and wide …
through your voice, your views, and your expertise. But the only way to do that
is by giving them enough free content to know you and trust you.

When I started my consulting business, I took all the business I could get on a
regional level. Slowly my business evolved and grew, completely on the back of
my blog content. And now I have connections all over the world through social
media. In fact, I’ve never spent one dime on any form of advertising for my
consulting business. In other words, my business has grown only because I give
everything away!

Unlock your content. Unleash it. Tear down those walls. And watch your
business grow!

3. Be entertaining, funny, and inspiring.
There’s a very good reason people share pictures of puppies.

Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott discovered that our first emotional action in
life is to respond to our mother’s smile with a smile of our own. A desire for joy
and happiness is hardwired into all of us. Joy can also be a driver of action.
Winnicott’s discovery of a baby’s “social smile” also tells us that joy increases
when it is shared.

No wonder, then, that happiness is an important driver for social media
sharing. Think about the content you like to spread to your friends or online
tribe. A lot of it is joyful, funny, or entertaining, right? Well, turns out there are a
lot of people like you out there! Research into the most-shared articles on the
web4 uncovers three primary emotions in the content:

Awe (25%)
Laughter (17%)
Amusement/entertainment (15%)

Pew Research5 reports that 35 percent of men and 43 percent of women are
on Facebook primarily to see entertaining or funny posts.

This idea also shows up in the Berger/Milkman research.6 They found that
content with a positive sentiment tends to go viral more than negative content.
It’s more complex than that of course—people share content that expresses a
wide range of emotions—but in general, staying positive should help you trend
toward better shareability.

Research by the company AgoraPulse7 found that the most-shared posts on
Facebook also had some element of inspiration in them, indicated by keywords