Why Your Content Is Not Being Shared As Often As In The Past
People Who Make The Most Money Are The Ones Who Capitalize On Change.
Change is difficult, change can be frustrating. It is also a prime opportunity for you to make a big move in your performance, your career, and even your life.
[tweet_box design=”default”]People who make the most money are the ones who capitalize on change.[/tweet_box]Change forces you to adjust your actions, to learn new thinking and in many cases to abandon practices and habits that have served you well in the past.
Social media is changing. Platforms change, approach changes, strategies change. Selling changes.
Before you dig your heels in and resist these changes, I want to encourage you to open your mind to the opportunities that change brings with it.
I have had several conversations in the last few months about the mindset they have regarding sharing of other site content online. Each one started with a complaint or a question from clients or colleagues around the practice of adding a pop-up or slide-in message on someone else’s website or blog post.
Here is an explanation of what we are talking about.
Old Way: When a post is shared, it sends the viewer, follower or subscriber to a URL of content that is expected to be useful. This delivers a new visitor to the site, they read and learn from the content, and then (typically) they leave the site.
New Way: Everything is the same as the old way until they go to leave the site. In this new approach, when the reader goes to leave the site (or after a certain period of time expires, or has scrolled through a percentage of the post) a slide-in or pop-up appears somewhere on the page of the blog post or website, containing a bit of relevant information from the person who sent the reader to the post in the first place.
They look something like this:
You would think the content creator that wrote the article had been robbed of their first-born! How dare someone attach a small piece of relevant content at the end of my post, after the reader is already finished and moving away from my site! These are real conversations, full of passion and anger.
If this has happened to you, and it probably has and you weren’t even aware of it, I ask you to think this through with me.
You have content that you want people to visit and read.
You want fresh, new visitors to your site to learn about you and what you offer.
I share your content because I think it will benefit my followers, bringing more traffic and new eyes to your work.
When they are done reading your masterpiece, they are going to leave your site, and a slide-in appears at the bottom of the screen, providing a link to another piece of content relevant to what they have just read. It could be to a blog post I have written, to an eBook that goes into more depth on the topic they just read about, or even a webinar on the topic.
What the heck are you complaining about!
- I just drove more visitors to your content – GOOD.
- I just introduced a new reader to your website and your work – GOOD.
- I added a note after they are done with a link to something that is helpful to the reader – GOOD.
Look at it from the reader’s perspective. They thought enough of me to follow a link to your website, on a topic that they are interested in on your site. When finished, they see a short note about something that is still “on-topic” and relevant to them. If they act on the note, they are continuing to learn more about something that is of interest. The reader is happy and appreciative for it all.
One of these conversations came around to the question – “Can I block people from doing this on my site?”
My answer is yes, you can, but why would you want to do that? Why would you want to eliminate those with the new thinking from sharing your content?
Remember the title of this post?
Why Your Content Is Not Being Shared As Often As In The Past
Sharing content on social media is changing. It is no longer a one-way street. I am happy to share, but I would also like to have a chance to enhance the reader experience by adding something of interest from me.
With this new capability comes new responsibility as well. If you are adding information that is not related to the topic, stop. If you are interrupting the reader experience, stop. It should always add an enhancement to the overall reader experience and complement your content.
Change or not, the decision is up to you. Rather than blocking others from sharing your content, add value by using technology that can do the same for the info you can share.
And if you don’t see me sharing your content as I have done in the past, now you know the reason why – things changed and you did not.
I’d love to read what you think about this. Is this a good change or a bad change. Will you explore how this technology could work for you? Will you block this technology from being used on your site? Tell me what you think in the comment area below.
