How to create shareable content
Creating shareable content on Instagram is extremely powerful in increasing your reach and getting more eyeballs on your account. The more people who view your content, the more opportunities you have to increase your following.
You need to understand what motivates users to share content.
Social approval is one of the biggest underlying motivations. People like to give their community a better sense of who they are and their attitudes towards life. This is so that they can get affirmative feedback from their social circles and be reassured that they are liked. Another key motivator is for self-fulfilment. People like to feel involved in the world and what’s going on. According to Foundation Inc (2020), 84% of people share content to support issues or causes that they care strongly about. This explains why we saw so many food bloggers sharing posts and hashtagging #supporthospo or #supportlocalbusiness during the Coronavirus pandemic. Keeping up to date with motivational factors will help you be able to develop the content that your audience will want to share.
Create quotable moments.
You should always be striving to create captions which people easily resonate with, whether they be thoughtful, educational, funny or highly relatable. However, people often don’t think to actually type the caption out on notepad and make it the 2nd photo on your post. This way - people can easily share it either as a story or post. It’s much more likely that people will share words rather than your photo.
Make sure your post has personality with a positive/uplifting feel.
You don’t need to be perfect! People often think they need to show up or filter themselves on Instagram to be the most perfect version of themselves. Just be you, be funny and let your personality shine through. People like to feel like they get to know the real you. The last thing you want your posts to sound and/or look like marketing material. No one wants to feel like they’re being sold something. Definitely make sure your captions inject your personality into them and are catchy, simple and valuable.
You could give your audience an incentive to share.
I found that running giveaways definitely allowed me to gain significantly more followers in a quick amount of time. As well as following you, liking the post and tagging a friend in order to enter to win, incentivise people to share your giveaway post on their stories or on their feed for a bonus 10 entries. Make sure to follow through and show in some way that you have included everyone’s bonus entries when announcing the winner as this ensures your audience trusts you.
Share your followers' content.
If you repost their content on your stories, with a caption to ‘check out ..’ , it will not only help you build relationships, but they might share the fact that you share their content. Especially if you have a larger account than them. That will then allow their audience to see your content and decide if they want to follow you. It’s also just nice to show your appreciation of the support of your followers too.
Hopefully these tips taught you something new, creating shareable content really is the key to your content going viral.
