Shane Rounce on Talk Fuse

Social Media Etiquette. Part I: Sharing Content

With going on 16+ years of website design and development experience, having started when I was 11, I've picked up a fair few tips and best practises to follow. Amongst these are some winning tips that I try to bestow on all my Clients, regarding sharing content to social media...

User-Shared Content (USC)

This is the content that you allow end-users to share, from your website, to an assortment of social networks, via provided buttons/links.

First of all there's one important rule to follow with USC: Never allow your content to become spam for the sake of self promotion.

It's easy to fall into the lure of social media's connection to viral sharing. Sure, it can be great if life of users find your content interesting and want to discuss it, however there is a time and place to do so. Just as you'd not include the comments for an article before the article itself, You shouldn't allow content to be shared before it's at least been given the opportunity to be properly digested by the end-user.

Too many people get invested in an interesting article title or enticing excerpt and, given the opportunity, will share the "cool" new content they found, often before investigating further. When this happens they're sharing something elsewhere on the web that they might not be completely clued in on. I refer to this as USC-Spam and this is bad practise. An end-user should never be given to opportunity share something they don't fully understand yet, they should be promoted to do so at the right time/place on the page.

This time/place should always be after the full length article has been digested by the end user. A good example of placement for share buttons would be between the article itself and a comments section. A bad example would be if they were placed directly above the article (prompting the user to share early) or, even worse, within a blog archive containing only titles and excerpts (prompting the user to share before ever even having loaded the page the article is on).

By only allowing content to be shared from the right place, after the article, users won't be ushered into passing on info they don't totally understand. If they share early it's basically the same concept as an old school chain email, forwarded again and again for fear of missing out of inclusion of something important. Just as early email accounts were the breeding ground for users to accidentally spam each other before they fully understood things, your website and social media could be combining to fuel the modern day equivalent of those ancient evils.

Remember that Social Media is great for engagement. Above all else, feedback is one of the most valuable assets to any entity operating on the Internet. It's a great way to implement the right changes, in the right way, based on customer or fan responses. You should always push for people to reply and share their opinions on your content, rather than just sharing it nonsensically. This in itself has a positive chain-affect: When followers of a user see them share something they have an opinion or a response for, they'll usually become more interested and investigative themselves, often ending in them also responding. The great thing about all these responses is that they should still, if replied to correctly, act as an organic route back to you and your content, without seeming forced, rushed to be shared or ill-informed.

Thinking through how USC is interacted with can definitely improve your social presence and earn you more organic traffic without compromising on your entity's appearance as a quality provider of content. Something as simple as the placement of some share buttons or the text used to engage a user into sharing can have a drastically positive outcome in the way all users perceive the service you're trying to provide to them over time.

Entity Shared Content (ESC)

When sharing content yourself, as whatever entity you're operating as online, you should always make sure to follow the "never spam" rule. Don't post content over and over because it didn't work the first time, not everything works right away and some stuff just never takes off. It's best not to to repeat failure whenever possible in life, the web is no exception. If something didn't work the first time, there's probably good reason for it. An article never shared is still better than one desperately repeatedly shared by the same social account.

Try and be as engaging as possible whilst still appearing to be humble. No one wants to see a business “beggin’ it”, people would rater simply feel compelled to click/tap on something because it’s relevant to their particular interests.

Twitter is important.

Despite being limited to just 140 characters, you really should not underestimate the marketing/promotional value of Twitter.

Share tweets, with links, with an image, to help increase attention to your content within people’s feeds. Never share an Instagram post to twitter (they don’t play well together), instead manually tweet the saved, edited, image that Instagram provides (after sharing) and you’ll have much more success with user engagement.

A lot of people are using Instagram to share their content these days, due to the high number of followers they have on there plus the ability to quickly share a nicely edited image to Facebook, too. Instagram, however, sorely lacks in the ability to actually include links within a post’s description, nor does it have any proper function for resharing content - both places that Twitter excels immensely.

The right tweet, at the right time, can be an invaluable asset for any business, given a good amount of user engagement.