Tipsheets get read, shared, used and acted upon
What makes people share information?
News they can use to live their lives better, according to Chadwick Martin Bailey research. Here are the Top 3 reasons people share:
- Because I find it interesting/entertaining: 72%
- Because I think it will be helpful to recipients: 58%
- To get a laugh: 58%
Want your blog posts and status updates to travel the world instead of staying home on the couch? Make them helpful to your social media network.
How-to stories and tipsheets work because they:
1. Get read.
One of the best ways to improve readership, according to The Readership Institute’s Impact study, is to make it easier for people to read and to find the information they’re looking for. Adding more “go and do” information — i.e., tips — makes messages easier to find and read, the researchers found.
2. Get shared.
What kind of information do people retweet? News and how-tos, according to research by Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist for HubSpot:
- News: 78%
- How-to information: 58%
- Entertainment: 53%
- Opinion: 50%
- Products: 45%
- Small talk: 12%
Please note: News is what CNN and the BBC report. It’s not your urgent updates about your Widget 2.6.3.1.
That leaves how-to information as our best bet for content. Want more retweets? Write blog posts packed with tips, techniques and step-by-step how-tos.
3. Get followed.
Informers are the 20% of Twitter users who tweet information, ideas and insights, new studies, quotes, resources and insights. “Meformers” are the 80% who tweet urgent updates about themselves.
Not surprisingly, informers have nearly three times as many followers as meformers, according to a study by Rutgers University professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase.
4. Get picked up.
Why how-to stories?
- Journalists and bloggers love tipsheets because they’re ready-made, how-to stories, sidebars and USA Today-style tips boxes. Your fire-safety tips post, for example, might accompany a news piece about a big apartment fire.
- Social media channels run on “Top 10 ways to …” listicles.
- Customers and clients will read the tipsheet you write today for years to come, making tip sheets the ultimate evergreen with an almost limitless shelf life.
5. Move readers to act.
Service story elements like addresses and maps move readers to act. In one experiment, for instance, 28% more college seniors got a tetanus shot when researchers added a map of campus with the health building circled and a list of times the shots were available.
Why not write a how-to story today?
How long should your content be?
How long should your blog post be? Your mobile headline? Online paragraphs? Sentences and words?
Learn to write readable content-marketing pieces that don't overwhelm readers — even on their smartphones — at Get Clicked, Liked & Shared, our content-writing workshop that starts April 18.
You’ll learn the most effective length for content-marketing pieces, online paragraphs, sentences and words. Then you’ll analyze your message with a free online writing tool and get tips and tools for meeting those targets.
Plus: Entice visitors to read more of your story by hitting one key on your keyboard more often. And learn to avoid using one “unretweetable” punctuation mark.
Save up to $100 with our group discounts.
