Make your customers dare to share your brand

A new study by ShareThis has found that 31 per cent of referral traffic on the Internet comes from sharing.

Facebook is the most popular platform for sharing referral traffic with 38 per cent of sharing links that are clicked on result in the site being  posted to Facebook.

It has also been discovered that 70 per cent of people will only click on one category with entertainment and shopping dominating on Facebook.

Surprisingly, Twitter only accounts for 11 per cent of sharing. Email 17 per cent and other sites like blogs and bookmarking making up the remaining 34 per cent.

Sharing is a good thing and having an option to do so is encouraged but you have to make your content good enough that people want to share it. Once people share a link they are making it personal to them, they are saying “hey check this out! It’s so cool/interesting/cheap/innovative that I thought I’d give you the opportunity to also see how cool/interesting/cheap/innovative it is!”

As a marketer, it’s necessary to offer information that induces this response, be it good or bad, and make people want to share. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertisement and sharing links on websites is just that.

Whether you have a widget like ShareThis or Facebook like buttons on pages, products and posts once someone clicks and shares your page they have become a representative for your brand and they have up to 600 friends that are also going to see this and have the option to share it again to their 600 friends.

The trick is making it easy to share and making it interesting enough that people will want to showcase your brand.

The power of sharing is that it is straight in the viewers face, they are interested to see why someone is showing them this. It can reach thousands of people in an hour and hundreds of thousands in a day. Think about how quickly that ‘planking’ craze took off, that’s the power of online sharing.