Or, the science of great content that gets shared.
In June, a team from Upworthy gave a presentation at Netroots Nation about their approach to writing headlines and other content – all the while getting your stuff shared out the wazoo. I thought it was a terribly useful deck then, especially for nonprofit organizations that struggle to not just build a social media following but, more critically, have trouble getting their social communities to do much of anything.
The deck was updated for Rootscamp this past weekend. Check out the deck here or embedded below – but only bother if you have any interest in doing what it takes to make your social media communications get attention. Hell, all your communications could benefit from these insights into headlines, interesting writing, testing, optimizing sharing, and testing some more.
A few highlights for your consideration…
- These folks know what they’re talking about. Upworthy launched in late-March, 2012. In eight months they have 791,000 Facebook fans, 43,000 Twitter followers, and 10,000 Tumblrs. Their early growth far (FAR) outpaces that of Huffington Post, BuzzFeed or Business Insider.
- Middle aged women are the biggest sharers on the Internet. If your mom wouldn’t share your stuff you’re probably failing.
- Write 25 headlines. Test the better ones. Use the best one.
- The share image matters. A lot.
- Make sharing on your website as easy as possible. So easy your mom could do it. Test these things, too.
- Test. Collect data. Figure out what the data says. Test again. Repeat. Rinse. Test again.
For what it’s worth, we have seen even small sharing optimization tweaks have huge impacts on sharing when working with clients on email, websites, social media, and so on. Make sharing easy. Write great content. Here’s Upworthy’s deck:
