The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

8 Secrets for Creating Shareable Content on Facebook

by 

Karrin Huynh

Last updated: July 14th, 2014

You know the saying “Silence is golden”?  Well … the exact opposite is true for Facebook. There is nothing worse than putting great content on Facebook and getting silence in return.

To put an end to the silence, we need to get real discussion and engagement going on. When your Facebook posts have more engagement, Facebook shows them to a bigger audience.

More reach = more engagement = even more reach.

It’s a positive feedback loop that makes the good Facebook pages HUGE. Why is Facebook engagement is so important for your business? The reason is that when there is a lot of engagement on the facebook posts promoting your business, there will be an increase of traffic back to your website! The more traffic, the more leads, which leads to more conversions! 

So how do we get more engagement happening on Facebook?  Create content that will be awesome and shareable on Facebook! I will let you in on my 8 personal favourite secrets to creating shareable content.

1. Invoke Emotion! 

Emotions are a crucial aspect of our daily lives. As human beings, we need to feel a range of different emotions. Sometimes we’ll even choose to listen to a sad song on purpose. On Facebook and a lot of other social media platforms, people love to engage and share content that is emotionally touching. 

What most people don’t realize is that as humans, we also love sharing emotionally touching content with people we care about. When we see something that touches us, we compulsively want to share that feeling with friends and family — whether it’s funny, sad, disturbing or even embarrassing!

2. Quiz’em! 

Weren’t pop quizzes the worst back in the day?! On Facebook they work great, and they are a great way to quickly reach a lot of people. The reason why quizzes do well is simple: people love sharing themselves more than anything else!

People don’t just want to prove that they know, for example, “what the most expensive car is” (its a $30 Million Mercedes-Benz) — they want to show off! Any awesome Facebook quiz should allow people to show how smart/interesting/cool they are.

3. Have an AWESOME headline! 

Headlines have really evolved over the last couple years. Love it or hate it, thanks to websites like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, headlines are no longer quick, boring summaries that tell you so much that you don’t want to read the article. They are enticing glimpses of the article that leave you wanting to know more.

If you can implement these “you-are-never-going-to-believe-what-you-are-about-to-read” headlines into your content, you will more than likely see an improvement with both engagement and reach.

“You’ll hate yourself if you don’t try this one weird technique for engaging readers”.

4. Give them something to look at!

According to psychologist Albert Mehrabian, 93% of communication is non-verbal. It is also said that our brains process visual stimulus 60,000 times faster than text! So whether it’s a great high-res picture or an amazing video, you need to provide awesome visuals in order to get people’s attention and get them hooked into the content as fast as possible. 

5. List it to them!

Lists also do great on Facebook. Usually when people are on the internet they are looking for information or entertainment but they don’t want to waste their time and energy reading a novel. 

Lists allow readers to scan quickly and still gain the information they want. Easily digestible content is also easier to share with friends that might also be interested. Compare these two scenarios:

6. Give them the FACTS!

Again, people who want information online want it fast! An interesting information can engage viewers even if it is just by itself. You’ll want to pick interesting and informative facts of course. No one cares about facts like: “Fact: today is Thursday”. If you provide interesting facts and figures, people are more likely to read, digest and share the content with their friends.

7. Know Your Audience 

Although we can give guidelines for how to make content as shareable as possible on Facebook, knowing your audience really is the best thing you can do to make your content shareable. Take full advantage of Facebook insights and get to know your fans inside and out!

Facebook’s insights can tell you what times your fans are online, what days of the week your fans are most likely to be around, what types of posts do best for your page (video, status, picture, etc), what topics have done well in the past, and the demographics of your fans (age, gender, locations, etc). Once you know all of this, you can get into the mindset of your audience  and your engagement and reach will naturally increase.

8. Keep Testing

If you are just starting out, the info on Facebook insights will not be as insightful. In this case, the most important thing to do is to test what works and what doesn’t! Try posting at different times, try posting videos as well as pictures. Try everything and don’t forget to track it and see what takes off and what doesn’t. This tip is not just for pages starting out, but can also be very useful for pages that have been around for a while. Thinking about a new idea but not sure if it will work? Why not test it out! You might just strike gold!  Just don’t forget to spend the time to look carefully and think about what’s working and what isn’t.

These 8 secrets are great ways to boost engagement on your business’s Facebook page. Once you get engagement ramping up, you can get exponential growth in your Facebook engagement. Not only is this fun and exciting, but the resulting traffic can have great effects on your business.