K atie c ouric

Don’t Force People to Share
You may have noticed that a lot of brands get people to share posts by
enticing followers to tag their friends or comment on a piece of content.
This is an effective strategy, but you need to have a solid reason to get
people to do so. You must create a necessity for people to take this
communication and expand it to their network. Latham Arneson reveals that
one of the worst things you can do is go and ask people outright to tag their
friends. Your job as a marketer is to give people a reason to involve others,
not just to tell them what to do. Ask yourself why they would want to bring
people they know into the conversation.
Posing a question to your audience is always a good strategy.
Paramount Pictures will often ask fans to tag friends who remind them of
certain characters in a movie trailer they’re promoting. It’s broad, relatable,
and allows the audience to easily involve their friends. Be context specific
with your call to actions. Make sure they correlate to the actual content and
are interwoven in a creative way.
With scary movies, for example, Arneson’s team created a sort of game
when they asked fans to tag the friend that would be most terrified of the
movie trailer. People like to see their friends get scared—it makes them
laugh. Or with romantic movie trailers, asking, “Whom would you most
want to experience this story with?” gives people an emotional and sweet
reason to bring their lovers into the mix.
Whenever Arneson’s team pushed an ad directly asking people to take
an action, like to buy tickets, those ads were shared the least. And, not to

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teach you how to be manipulative or anything, but if you want someone to
do something for you, make it seem like you’re helping them do what 
they
already want to do. Don’t ask them outright to do what you want them to
do. Let them do things their own way. Don’t ask them to share. Make them
want to share.
Give It Up Fast
Unlike the dating world, in social media you need to give it up fast. Show
your audience the goods! Brownstein explains that his team creates videos
that reveal a ton in the beginning. He wants people to lean forward and
think, “Oh, what’s this goin’ to be?” so that they stay interested and want to
watch till the end to see how the rest plays out. Letting the viewer in on the
gag, for example, helps them feel like they’re part of playing the prank.
Julius Dein also explains that he tries to hook his audience within the
first three or four seconds of the video, making sure something exciting and
interesting happens right away. He suggests keeping the introductions to a
minimum and making the video fast paced and engaging. Recently on
Facebook, movie studios have also started adopting this approach. They
create five-second movie trailers that play before the full movie trailer to
more quickly capture their audiences’ attention.