The Importance of Sharing ❤️

These days it’s more about distancing than sharing but when it comes to social media, sharing is caring!

You create amazing content with fabulous graphics… but you’re not happy with how many views your posts are getting.

There are several strategies to improve your likes, engagement and growth but one of the easiest, least expensive and yet, all-to-often overlooked, is simply getting your friends, family and staff engaged.

We would never tell anyone to badger their family to share their posts from their social media; that would not be cool. But we do recommend that a business page is liked by friends, family and staff – especially when it’s brand new.

We’re not suggesting a pyramid scheme that takes advantage of family members  or anything like that, but family and friends are going to be the best supporters of your business. They’re likely to tell a friend to use your business if it comes up in conversation. If they see someone looking for a product or service, they may suggest your business (especially if it’s top-of-mind because they see your professional daily content).

Social Media, especially Facebook, has become a place where people will literally ask their friends who they recommend. I see posts every day asking if anyone knows of a good plumber or where the best burgers are. Hair styling services to retail to realtors and even social media managers – people use their social media to ask for referrals.

People are happy to give out the name of a business they’ve had a good experience with.

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What does this have to do with sharing you might ask?

You’ve finally decided your business should be on social media – let’s say you’re going to start with Facebook.

If you’re just creating a new business page – once you’ve selected the type of page you’re creating, you’ll see a number of fields to fill out such as business category, name, address etc. Once you’ve completed the business information you will be prompted to “invite friends” to like your business page. This does not come through like a solicitation. It simply comes up in the little notifications bell 🔔   (on your friends personal page) and says “you’ve been invited to like so and so’s business page”.

If you have an existing page, you can still invite your friends: click here to learn how, directly from Facebook.

Perhaps you hire an agency like Lexabi or you go it on your own – either way, you’re creating a content plan (click here to download our complimentary content calendar), have the resources for excellent graphic design and know how to write for social media.

You know this is not a sprint, but a social journey for client nurturing and customer service.

You have your cover image perfect, you’ve optimized your pages business information, including the about section, and all the details.

You begin publishing your content. Now what?

If some of your friends and family chose to like your page from your initial invitation, they will be some of your biggest advocates and this is where the sharing starts. And sharing = growth.

If you’re creating content that is “shareable”, your fans will enjoy sharing it with their friends and colleagues. Considering that the average number of friends people have on Facebook is around 200 (the average number of connections people have on LinkedIn is around 900) this can snowball into a fair amount of exposure for you – and hopefully some new page likes.

Before we carry on, remember that one of the reasons you want to be on social media is because it is ‘searchable’ on Google. If you’re creating posts that attract long comments, encourages sharing and comments, your page is more likely to be ranked higher in the feed as well as on Google.

We’ve finally come to why sharing is caring. If you’re creating content that people find entertaining, informative or educational it is likely to be shared by friends family and staff. Why? Because people like to inform, educate and entertain… especially from a trusted source.

Using social media as a sales stream is where you’ll go wrong and probably won’t receive much, if any, engagement. People simply won’t share your content if all it does is try to push your products or services. It’s not the way to use social media.

Never expect staff, family or friends to share every single post you create. But if you’re doing it right they will proudly share your content occasionally, which creates more buzz around your brand.

Don’t be afraid to mention the importance of sharing social media content at your next staff meeting!