How To Maximize Social Sharing of Your Emails
By Anna Johnson on October 14th, 2009Yesterday, we discussed the results of Silverpop’s ‘Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance’ study, which showed the potential of including links that enable readers to share your email content on social networks.
With the benefits of greater exposure – and ultimately traffic, conversions and sales – at stake, how should you implement social network sharing links in your emails?
Silverpop advises that the first step to any such initiative is to understand what motivates people to share content in the first place.
Paraphrasing Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, authors of Groundswell, the main reasons driving people to share any kind of content are to:
- Contribute to the conversation
- Derive some personal benefit e.g. cash, points, discounts, freebies, etc.
- Give to others
- Validate their own sense of worth, expertise or views
- Affiliate with others; and
- Alleviate guilt for ‘gawking’ at other people’s misfortunes
Accordingly, ‘shareworthy’ content is content that allows someone to meet any or all of these needs and, as such, tends to be:
- Trustworthy
- Interesting to the ‘tribe’ or intended audience
- Simple and obvious i.e. it speaks for itself and is simple to disseminate
- Valuable to readers (with the exception of content readers consider to be relevant to friends or colleagues rather than themselves)
- Rewarding in a material or non-material way; and
- Good quality i.e. the content is well written.
As you might imagine, creating content that meets all six criteria is easier said than done. Still, these are criteria worth aspiring to, especially if there’s the possibility of having your email content go viral on a social network or two!
Source: Silverpop, “Emails Gone Viral: Measuring Share to Social Performance,” Silverpop, October 2009
