First and foremost, Facebook is a communication tool. In theory, everything that occurs on the site should be facilitating communication. As such, the options and tools built into it are all conducive to this.
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For instance, Facebook gives you the ability to share a post with your friends but it also gives you the ability to share something directly to another friend. And this is again something you might have done yourself.
So if you were to see a fun looking article on ‘Challenges Only People Who Work From Home Will Understand’, you might decide to share it with your friend who works from home. Or if you see an article on ‘Why Alligators and Crocodiles Are NOT Dinosaurs’, you might decide to share that with your friend who insists that they are dinosaurs. In each case, you are using your post to either start a new conversion, to carry one on, or to show the friend you’re thinking about them and you ‘get them’. Sometimes content will even be shared mid discussion on Facebook to back up a point. How do you get your content to be used in this manner? Simple: think about the specific person you are aiming your content at as you write it. Write it for someone you know in fact – and then share it with them. Chances are that if you know someone who can benefit from the article, other people will as well.
Another strategy is to think about discussions and arguments you’ve had in the past and to write more broadly on that subject.
Sometimes people wil also post content to Facebook in a more public way. If you share something to your own wall, it’s often because you want to start a discussion about it and use Facebook as a public forum. Maybe you’ve seen an article on how politicians are increasing their own salaries and you feel outraged – you might respond by sharing that content so that you can start a discourse on the subject and poll the opinions of your friends and family. Note that this might also mean you end up sharing content that you actually don’t like or even feel strongly against. The belief 11
that you only share things because you like them then is certainly misguided
So how do you create content that wil get this kind of response and get shared as a result? The trick is to think of things that are divisive and that people wil think about one way or the other. In other words, it’s better for your articles to create a strong negative reaction than it is for them to create no reaction at all.