Creating content your readers will feel compelled to share on social media is crucial to reaching a wider audience.

Nevertheless, content marketers need to pay more attention to the importance of organic exposure when creating a strategy to gain visibility.

This is mainly because sharing is out of their hands. No matter your tactics, you can never bank on a certain number of readers liking, tweeting, or posting a link to your latest article. What you can do, however, is everything in your power to ensure that the content is as share-worthy as possible.

One of the main objectives for any content team is to ensure that readers are so captivated by what they are reading that they can’t help but think: “Hey, you know who else would love to read this? Everyone who follows me on Twitter and all of my Facebook friends!”

To make this happen, you’ll first need to develop an exciting and highly relevant topic for your readers. You can even forget about getting someone to click on a headline that doesn’t speak to them personally, let alone share it.

Then, you’ll need to create content that is insightful and engaging. You don’t just want to provide information that your readers haven’t already read a dozen times before. Still, you want to do it in a way that makes them genuinely enjoy reading the piece.

Easy.

Digital marketers and content specialists would disagree. There’s no paint-by-numbers approach to creating share-worthy content.

While the combined experience of skilled content strategists and writers can get you close to this goal, it’s an excellent idea to research various tools and mechanisms that can assist them.

Or, you can just read the rest of this article. Because we’ve done the research for you.

Here are ten things you can use to ensure your content has a solid shot at going viral.

Rethink Your Content Topics

The guys and girls over at Hubspot know a thing or two about good content. This NYSE-listed marketing-software company has been around for 14 years and boasted annual revenue of over $650m in 2019.

Companies need to be more knowledgeable regarding tools that help with social media marketing, content management, and SEO.

We place so much stock in their awesome Blog Topic Generator. It’s a free tool that allows you to enter up to five nouns that act as topic themes and then automatically generates 250 blog titles based on what you’ve provided.

While you may not copy the titles strictly as provided, the topics will go a long way to help you rethink your current approach to content creation. It may even break you out of a creative rut hurting your ability to engage the audience.

See What Your Competitors are Doing

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer has long been the go-to tool for some ethical spying on your competitors.

With Ahrefs, finding the top-performing content pieces for a specific topic is an absolute cinch. You’re shown hundreds of thousands of results sorted by various beneficial metrics by entering a keyword or keyword string.

One of these sort-metrics is the number of shares a particular piece enjoyed on three social networks: Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Using this feature, you can easily spot similarities between share-worthy content and copy these strategies in your content conceptualization and creation efforts. Articles in a list form outperform in-depth think-pieces when it comes to being shared. Or posts exceeding a specific word count aren’t shared as often as shorter pieces.

If you take content marketing seriously, we wholeheartedly recommend delving into what Ahrefs offers.

It’s an excellent tool. Start using it asap.

Stay Informed

You must stay on top of your game if you’re responsible for conceptualizing or writing share-worthy content.

One of the best ways to hone your skills is by regularly consuming top-quality content. Reading makes you a better writer, keeps you in touch with content creation trends, and inspires you to do your best work.

But sadly, there are only so many hours in a day, and finding time to read content that you stumble across organically isn’t always possible.

Enter Pocket – a content saving and curation app that lets you compile everything you want to read and watch, keeping it in an organized space whenever you’re ready to enjoy it.

Say goodbye to clumsy bookmark management or whatever outdated methods you used to “save something for later.” Keeping yourself up-to-date and inspired doesn’t get much easier than with Pocket.

Get Scientific

Is it necessary to mention the importance of writing an attention-grabbing headline again?

Yes, it is.

Your headline is the first thing every reader (or potential reader) will see in your content. If it doesn’t make them want to click or continue reading, all the effort you poured into writing the piece was wasted.

An experienced writer will be knowledgeable enough in this area to develop a sufficiently compelling headline. But it never hurts to do some extra analysis in this area.

Advanced Marketing Institute’s excellent Headline Analyzer tool assesses the headline. It gives it a score based on its Emotional Marketing Value (EMV).

Based on a proprietary formula developed by the institute, a content specialist can instantly see the headline’s overall effectiveness expressed as a percentage.

The tool goes even further by allocating a helpful descriptive term to your headline, indicating the type of emotional response the reader will likely have.

Stick to the Point

Ernest Hemingway was a notorious advocate for simplicity. The Nobel Prize-winning journalist believed in short sentences and simple words communicating only what was absolutely necessary.

This idea is the backbone of the beneficial tool Hemmingway Editor. This app analyzes large sections of text to help writers simplify their work.

Suppose readers have to wade through unnecessary descriptive terms or use a dictionary to understand what you’re trying to tell them. In that case, you’re failing at keeping them engaged.

From identifying long-winded paragraphs to suggesting less pretentious alternatives to complex words, Hemingway’s editor helps writers create engaging, compelling, and share-worthy content.

It’s straightforward to use, and its suggestions are clear and easy to implement. It’s also available as a desktop app to simplify the editing process.

Get Inspired

For several reasons, you should use infographics and other visual elements in your content. One of the most relevant of these is that infographics are shared three times more often than every other type of content on Social Media.

If you’re creating a data-driven piece of content that can be expressed visually, consider making something far more share-worthy than a traditional article.

As any decent graphic designer will tell you, converting a complex set of concepts into an engaging graphical element is challenging.

Fortunately, Pinterest is a fantastic resource for inspiration. Simply searching for any topic and including the search term “infographic” in the search term yields thousands of well-curated results.

There are some brilliant designers out there creating highly engaging, share-worthy infographics. Head over to Pinterest and have a look at what they’re making. You’re sure to come away with a bunch of excellent ideas.

Be Visually Creative

Following on from our point about the importance of using visuals to make content more share-worthy, let’s look at a tool that helps regular folk create high-quality graphics.

Canva is a free, web-based app that enables people without graphic design skills to create appealing visuals for various uses.

From beautiful header images that entice your audience to engage with your content to complex infographics, Canva makes the entire process simple, fast, and affordable.

Canva’s selection of premade visual elements means that its learning curve is minimal and massively reduces the effort and cost required to create share-worthy content.

Make Sharing Easy

Most of your readers aren’t even going to think about sharing your content if you don’t let them know it’s an option.

Even those highly motivated readers to share your content must copy the page URL and paste it into their social media platforms. This clumsy process can easily be bypassed with the correct tool.

ShareThis offers a suite of products that boost audience engagement, with their Share Buttons being the flagship tool.

All you have to do is select the style of share buttons most appropriate for your site, select the content management platform that it runs on, and follow the simple integration instructions.

Including visible yet unobtrusive calls to action that make sharing as easy as a couple of clicks will skyrocket your sharing statistics.

Be Hyper-Relevant

It’s one thing creating engaging content that appeals to your audience when you’re hoping to see it shared.

But it’s another thing entirely to zoom in on a particular topic that’s captured the internet’s attention at a given moment and capitalize on its popularity.

Using Google Trends, it’s possible to see the most popular news stories and search terms over the past 24 hours. It’s even possible to drill down to a specific country to create content that appeals to a particular demographic.

Bear in mind that your content team will need to be capable of converting these trending topics into fresh perspectives that are relevant to your site. They must also do so quickly to leverage the world’s momentary obsession with a particular issue.

Creating and publishing content that’s super relevant at a particular time isn’t easy. But it will positively impact your content’s share worthiness when you notice and manage to make the most of it.

Take Care of Yourself

We’ll end our list with something often overlooked in articles like this: your general mind.

Doing everything we discussed in this article correctly – and having the continued motivation to do so – depends on a high level of creativity and mental stamina.

You can alter your habits and lifestyle in many ways to ensure that your mind performs at maximum capacity. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Get Enough Rest

The correlation between a good night’s rest and improved mental performance has long been established. Ensuring you get enough hours of sleep on a comfortable bed is essential to functioning at your creative peak.

Exercise

In his book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, psychiatrist Dr John Ratey explains how breaking a sweat and lifting your heart rate profoundly affects increased mental capacity.

Exercising frequently allows your brain to balance the neurotransmitters that affect your brain’s ability to concentrate and perform at its peak.

So get that tennis racket out, start jogging, or join a gym. It will have a remarkable impact on your performance at work.

Maintain a Healthy Work-Life Balance

Do whatever you can to stop measuring your workplace effectiveness based on the number of hours you work. Suppose you want to continue being successful at your job. In that case, finding that delicate balance between the time you spend working and relaxing is essential.

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Eric Garton suggests that a poor work-life balance and resultant burnout are more often the employer’s fault than the employee’s.

If you’re in a position to influence your company’s culture in a way that prioritizes employees’ mental well-being, do what you can to motivate staff to work a healthy number of hours per week.

Conclusion

Creating share-worthy content doesn’t just come down to hiring the right people for the job.

While expertise alone does help with creating captivating content, content strategists and writers must arm themselves with tools that help with the various elements that drive virality.

Many companies have tapped into this need, providing their teams with information and functionality critical to maximizing the chances of seeing content shared by readers.

By combining these tools and ensuring that skilled content teams are mentally prepared for the challenge, site owners are sure to see spikes in their organic traffic stats.