In part I of our guide, we brought you 3 simple content marketing tips that have been backed by science. These included creating a curiosity gap in your headlines, using numbers within your articles and of course, knowing who your exact target market is in order to craft appropriate content tailored to your audience.
In part II of this guide, we bring you a further 4 tips designed to help you craft likeable, shareable content that is designed to boost shares:
Use the Right Words in your titles
Studies have discovered that using words such as ‘no’, ‘stop’ and ‘without’ in your titles leads to more shares than words such as ‘do’ or ‘start’. Furthermore, the following list of words has been proven to be more popular within headlines:
-Smart
-Surprising
-Science
-Critical
-Huge
-Hacks
-History
If you are going to tweet a post, opt for the following words:
-You
-Free
-Media
-Please
-Great
-10
-Follow
-How To
-Top
-Check out
-New blog post
Choose Verbs over Nouns
In a study carried out by social media scientist, Dan Zarrella, he discovered that tweets using adverbs and verbs had a higher click through rate than those using nouns and adjectives. This is because verbs are generally stronger in meaning compared with nouns or adjectives and have a far more persuasive influence over readers.
Make it Surprising
Using the word ‘surprising’ in your titles helps to capture the attention of your audience more easily while also maintaining their interest as they make their way through the articles. We often try to use the word ‘surprising’ in our blog posts at 8 Ways Media, for instance:
Surprising SEO Benefits of Multimedia Production
Articles of this nature have been proven to be more interesting and stimulating to the reader, thus attracting their attention more easily and keeping them interested for longer.
Avoid Announcements
Research has found that posts with the words ‘announcing’ ‘celebrates’ and ‘wins’ generated the least amount of likes and shares. To contrast, posts with the word ‘lose’ led to a higher number of shares, suggesting that negative words are more shareable than positive ones.
To avoid going down the announcement route, instead opt to create a story with pictures, a timeline of events and even an infographic. Everyone loves a good story, and telling stories is a fundamental communication method that triggers our brains, activating certain parts of the brain and essentially putting the entire organ to work.
As you can see there are plenty of ways to craft powerful, creative content that boosts likes, comments and shares. If you would like help with your next content marketing strategy, get in touch today to find out how 8 Ways Media can help you.
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