Exploring Degrees of Online Sharing

Many people that consider social media, think that the targets are too small a demographic to be worthwhile. They say, “What good is targeting, 15,000 people when I can create an ad that will reach many more than that?”.

Although, on the surface, social media may seem to be a waste of time, because of the ability to organically share, the basic numbers can be misleading. To fully understand how content is shared on the web, we must understand degrees of sharing.

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What Does Degrees of Sharing Mean?

When a consumer shares some sort of content, they enter a chain. The content must have originated from somewhere, allowing us to count how many shares have happened. That number, is the degree of sharing.

In other words, when the source disseminates information, that would technically be first degree sharing. If a consumer passes it along, that act would be a second degree sharing. As you can imagine this can go on to the nth degree, however, each successive share becomes less likely.

When we are trying to convince consumers to be “social”, we are focusing on 2nd and 3rd degree sharing. We focus on the 2nd and 3rd degree, because this is where the content is most likely to be shared. However, realizing that successive shares do occur is important.

Why Is It Important?

In social media, degrees of sharing is integral because each degree increases the number of viewers, exponentially.

Consider a business blog that has 500 daily visitors. If 10 of those visitors tweeted the the article, or sent it to Facebook, the article could be seen by all their friends.

Potentially, if 100 people shared it to their 200 friends, the article (at least the headline) could have been see by about 20,000 new viewers. Remember that the number is just a rough estimate, because it doesn’t take into consideration who is online, or friends that ignore the headline.

But, now that 20,000 new viewers have been exposed to the article, 2,000 of those users (assuming 10% of readers will use some kind of social media, down from the 20% we assumed above) may pass it on to their friends.

A Tour Through a Large Blog’s Traffic

A Tour Through a Large Blog’s Traffic

By the time we reach the 3rd degree of sharing, 420,500 people will have seen the article. You can see how quickly content can pass along social media.

How to Take Advantage of Degrees of Sharing

Now that you know how powerful sharing can be, what techniques can you employ to take advantage of the phenomenon?

The first thing to do is reducing sharing obstacles. This includes, ensuring that you have clearly defined social media buttons and an “e-email this” button. Include social proof to convince consumers that other people are sharing it too.

Once your site is social media friendly, take the time to optimize which social sites you’ve included and their location.

Consider emphasizing or prominently placing share buttons for sites that spread content to friends (example: Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace). This way readers are more likely to spread content to friends versus sites like Digg, where it has become more difficult to get content to become popular.

Writing quality content that people want to pass to their friends is difficult, but the reward for creating that content is great. Making it simpler to share the article and keeping “social media” in mind while creating posts can increase the likelihood that your content will be spread.

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