18 content marketers share their secrets for share-worthy content

Forbes began this year with the prediction “2012 will be the year of content.”  They say “content marketing and social media marketing should be a part of every brand’s marketing plan.”
But is your content share-worthy? After all, what good is putting it out if it doesn’t create a community of advocates who help spread the word.
Here are steps 18 content marketers take to make their content share-worthy.

1. FIND YOUR AUDIENCE: “Find your target audiences’ online hangouts, spend some time listening to the conversations happening on those sites. What topics are important to them? What gets them excited? This allows you to create your own content strategy to best meet your target audience’s existing wants and needs.” – Susan Gunelius, Forbes
2. PROVIDE INSTANT GRATIFICATION: “Providing instant gratification is all about effectively delivering high-quality content in bite-sized pieces. It’s about making your blog readers’ lives easier. Take a look at Seth Godin’s blog. He’s the undisputed master of instantly gratifying, bite-sized blog content.” – Amy Porterfield, Social Media Examiner
3. USE YOUR KEYWORDS: “Spend some time doing some research to find what people are typing into the search engines to find you. Use those words in your post titles and in your blog to make your content easier to find. Don’t over do this. Having easy to read posts trumps lots of keywords any day.” – Michele Scism, Social Media Coach and Speaker
4. MAKE CONTENT A PART OF EVERYONE’S JOB: “Companies that really buy into content marketing are increasingly taking the “everyone” approach. Clearly, when the job is creating lots of content, it helps to have lots of contributors.” – Rebecca Lieb, Editor-in-Chief, ClickZ Network
5. SEED STRATEGY: “The most effective seeding strategy when it comes to facilitating sharing behaviour is to distribute the content via social media itself. But most businesses lack a truly engaged audience within Twitter or Facebook. If this is the case, seed the content via more traditional channels. Linking to the content from your customer email newsletter is a great starting point.” – Jamie Duthie, SEO People
6. RELEASE A LIST: “Every smart marketer knows that ‘top lists’ have the ability to generate a lot of buzz and traffic to your site because this type of content is highly shareable and linkable.” – Amanda Maksymiw, OpenView Venture Partners
7. REWARD YOUR EXISTING FANS: “They’ll feel a deeper relationship with your brand and that will increase sales.” – Lauren Drell, Mashable
8. RECAP YOUR MOST POPULAR SOCIAL CONTENT: “Include a list of your ‘best of’ content from your social channels. Include your most popular blog posts, your most re-tweeted tweets or your most commented Facebook posts. Whatever people find interesting in your social channels will likely spark the interest of your email recipients, so including popular social content in your emails can create additional interest.” – Adam Holden-Bache, Social Media B2B
9. OPTIMIZE FOR RETWEETS: “Twitter is a very powerful platform for getting people to engage and share online. To encourage readers to share your content on a site like Twitter, try creating content targeted specifically for Twitter sharing. You can use a tool like the Most ReTweetable Words Finder to find words on any topic, and then include your favorite recommended word in the title of your post, video, or photo, or use it to retweet your own content.” – Tiffany Monhollon, Digital Content Manager, ReachCast (The chart below shows the click-through rate Twitter delivers to substantiate what Tiffany is talking about)
10. MEASURE IT: “If it doesn’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense.” – Dan Zarella, HubSpot
11. SHOW COURTESY: “Do you reply to your comments? Do you thank people for sharing your posts, tweeting them, and linking to them? Your sincere ‘you attitude’ makes you courteous—and it makes you likeable. Courtesy is politeness growing out of respect and concern for others. Be thoughtful, appreciative, helpful, and truly respectful to your readers. Remember you are building a community here, so you want to promote values that define you as a person.” – Darren Rowse, ProBlogger
12. ADD MORE MULTIMEDIA TO YOUR PAGE: “By multimedia, I mean photos, images, videos, audio, infographics, slide shows and videos. Readers seem to prefer pages which combine text with one or more multimedia elements.Yes, they’ll appreciate your well-written, informative text. But they also like to watch video, browse through a slide show of images, study an infographic or listen to an audio interview.” – Nick Usborne, Author and Coach
13. DO RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND WHAT CONSUMERS ARE LOOKING FOR IN VIDEOS: “Many companies want the profits from viral videos. Unfortunately, very few companies do the research to understand exactly what consumers are looking for in videos online. As a result, companies often invest in videos without receiving much of a profit in return”  – Spencer Belko, Search Engine Journal (Here is a chart to show the types of video that are shared most often)
14. YOUR GOAL SHOULD BE TO BECOME THE AUTHORITY: “This will increase your brand value and your reach. And in the same time the people who listen when you speak – publish content. This makes it easier to build relationships and to get long lasting business ties.” – Dragan Mestrovic, inBlurbs 
15. FIND THE NEW: “News has never traveled faster than it does today through social media. Of course, following ‘unfolding events’ is one kind of ‘new.’ But there are of course other ways to think about content newness. For example, new can also mean a podcast that contains a unique way of looking at an old issue, or a post that -brings some novel insight to the fore, or a video that summarizes a complex topic in a way not done before.” – StrategicBit
16. DO A SURVEY OF CURRENT CUSTOMERS: “Talk to the people on the front line – frequently” – Jeff Ogdon, HubSpot
17. THINK LIKE A PUBLISHER. “Have a clear idea why you’re doing what you’re doing.” – Joe Puluzzi, Junta42 and Founder of the Content Marketing Institute 
18. WRITE KILLER HEADLINES:  All of the writers in this list expressed this point. One emphasized it particularly well by saying: “Your headline is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.” – Brian Clark, Copyblogger

Will you be making the effort so your content is share-worthy? Do these steps point you in the right direction?