Why Fans Share and How Brands Can Capitalize On It

At fMC 2012, Facebook’s first conference for marketers, Facebook global head of brand design Paul Adams presented one of the most important talks of the entire event. In the session, “What People Share and Why,” Adams suggested that people are not necessarily predisposed to this behavior. “If you look at likes, comments and shares, there are a lot more likes and comments,” Adams said. “This is because sharing isn’t natural. Talking is much more natural and brands should focus on talking: why we talk, how we talk, who we talk to, and what we talk about.”

Adams then outlined four main reasons why people share. They are: to make life easier, to build relationships, to help others, and to craft our identity. Below are examples of how brands use each of these to increase the sharing of their content, as well as metrics for how to accurately determine what share methods work best.

Create Content That Makes People’s Lives Easier

Brands need to understand why people talk. By doing so, it is much easier to create vibrant communities and conversations. The first reason people talk is to make life easier. For brands, that means creating content that makes something easier for their fans.

Rite Aid is one brand that has taken this to heart, knowing that it can provide its customers with a number of helpful hints for every day life. In the example below, Rite Aid offers helpful household hints, with items that can be purchased at Rite Aid, no less. Who would think to use WD-40 to remove crayons from a computer screen?

Build Relationships With Fans

Think about how you develop a friendship with someone. In most cases, you won’t become best friends with someone you have just met. Instead, the friendship forms over a number of short interactions. This is the same for person-to-person interactions as well as brand-to-person interactions. A single interaction with a brand is normally not enough to create a brand evangelist. Instead, that relationship is built over a number of short interactions. The image below shows the median number of words for posts and comments made by users on Facebook. The key takeaway from this chart is just how small these numbers are.

But using the strategy of several short interactions doesn’t just work for Facebook. In the example below, gaming website IGN shared a simple image on Google+ with four words of text in the subject of the post and just eight words of text in the image.

 The result of this lightweight interaction: nearly 3,500 +1s, and perhaps more impressively, more than 1,100 shares.














Provide Help to Other People
There are a number of ways in which brands can offer help and assistance to fans, which will in turn create positive experiences that lead to a trusting relationship. One option is to provide customer service help to fans when they ask questions, encounter problems, or vent frustrations concerning your brand. It can be as simple as answering a question, or as deep as providing a detailed solution to a problem. In the example below, JetBlue uses its Twitter account to respond to a number of customer service issues that may arise while passengers are interacting with the airline. But it’s not just issues that the company addresses on Twitter. There are also responses to positive experiences and wishes for a nice trip.

Craft an Identity
People talk and share to craft their own identity. We all want to seem smart, funny, cool or in-the-know. By posting content that projects the desired identity, brands can shape views of themselves while also garnering important feedback on how users perceive them. At the end of the day, people are just as much sharing a person or brand’s social presence as they are sharing content.

Benchmark Sharing Success

How do you know which of the above strategies is getting people talking and sharing? The first step is to create benchmarks and then measure them. There are a number of different metrics that you can use for benchmarking success. With respect to sharing, here are the most important strategies and indicators:

1. Post Type: Look at metrics by post type (photo, video, text, poll, question, etc.) to determine what is working for your brand, and adjust as necessary. Think about what your friends often share, and what content would get you to share to your own social networks. Use this knowledge to guide your own brand posting strategy.

2. Call to Action: In addition to creating the content, tell your fans what you want them to do. Sure, compelling content can attract eyeballs, and may be enough to get people to share. But to reinforce the point, tell people to share or retweet your content out to their own social networks.

3. Character Count: As I mentioned earlier, short is sweet. Experiment with different post lengths to determine what gets people talking the most. Remember, trust is built on a series of many lightweight interactions.

4. Time of Day: Every brand’s fan base will engage with posts at a different time of day (or night), so look at your own content to see when your fans are most engaged. If there is a particular time that does not see much traffic, forgo it for a time when more of your fans and followers are online and engaged.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Tsuji


Michael “MJ” Jaindl is chief client officer at Buddy Media, maker of the social-enterprise software of choice for eight of the top ten advertisers in the world. Visit Buddy Media’s blog for more on social marketing.
 

Source: Why Fans Share and How Brands Can Capitalize On It