Wednesday, August 10, 2011

"Friends and Family" Key to Social Sharing of Content

"Friends and family" might be the most-crucial audience for most shared content. A recent AOL-Nielsen study showed that 23 percent of social media messages include content and that 60 percent of that content is shared as a link back to a published piece. Another 36 percent of social media messages embed content in the message.

In other words, people share content a lot, and the majority of the time they share it as a link. What is significant, though, is that people “overwhelmingly" share content with friends and family.

Most of the sharing that people do isn’t to the public at large, but to their own smaller network of family and friends. That probably is not so helpful for firms using content marketing approaches; obviously more effective for consumer products and services.

Another study of sharing via apps on Facebook showed that auto-generated “broadcast” messages that appear in users’ social streams massively drive up user adoption of the application. When users added a personal message (like “Check out this cool app I found!”), adoption increased by another 98%. Messages in the users’ stream are 10 times more effective than banner ads for gaining adoption.

Again, content shared in the inner circle carries greater influence, especially if accompanied by a personal message.

People tend to share and click links in specific categories or genres, too. Frequent linkers on Facebook have distinctive genre, topic and source patterns particular to their interests.

When it comes to sharing, 80 percent of people share only one category of links and more than 70 percent will only ever click on one category, whether that is business, politics, or entertainment. Read more here.

That is where content marketing can work. If a brand can become a trusted source for content on specific topics, a brand has a better chance of buying entry into the inner circles of large numbers of your target customers, and increases the likelihood that users will read the content that you share.

Social media gold lies in the inner circle


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