Sharing is Caring – How Re-sharing Content can Help Grow your Business
As any digital marketer will tell you, original content is the key to getting noticed online. Having useful, authentic and stand-out content brings people to your website, makes them sit up and take notice on social media and can lead to viral marketing if the content is catchy enough; videos especially get shared around a lot and when enough people share with their friends, your content can get around the world in a matter of days, reaching people you'd never thought possible. Original blog content, website resources and social media posts (including photos, videos and quizzes) are what sets you apart from your competitors, so why would you want to share the same content over and over again? Surely this goes against the whole concept of original content?
Well, yes and no. Of course, sharing the same article over and over again on your social media channels will appear as spamming your fans with the same stuff until they get sick of it, but doing this isn't re-sharing as it should be done. Re-sharing, done right, simply allows you to increase the reach of your content to people who would not have otherwise seen it. Key factors for re-sharing content include time zones, content related to newsworthy events and using brand ambassadors to get your message out there.
If you have global customers, or you know that half your customers are online in the morning and the other half late at night then you would do well to share the same content twice each day. That way when you have an interesting blog post to shout about the early birds and night owls get notified about it when it is convenient for them. Those who have already seen it will not see it again, as they will be asleep at the time of the second sharing.
Keeping one eye on the news and current events means you can capitalise on the interest surrounding a particular topic and use this to re-share pertinent content you may have written several months beforehand. Piggy-backing on trending topics opens your doors to an audience with whom you may not have connected in the past. Similarly, using brand ambassadors to share your content ensure you reach people who might have been unaware of your business had they not seen your content shared by a trusted friend. Re-sharing doesn't have to be done by the business social media account, and in fact the message may appear more trustworthy coming from a “real person” rather than a business account.
Re-sharing is all about increasing engagement and getting your best content out there to as many people as possible. Sometimes you can tweak the headline or the message a little if there are dated elements, but often a simple re-share with the exact same message can work just as well. The Twitter hashtag #tbt stands for ThrowBack Thursday and is ideal for resharing content under. Choose your favourite old content and share it again using the #tbt hashtag, or simply use the tag to repost content from exactly one year ago.
Whether you created it yourself or paid someone else to, if your best performing and most popular content can work harder for you and pull in new readers or customers on a regular basis why not get the most mileage out of it? Don't leave great content buried and assume everyone will go digging for it as most people are passive consumers of online content.
