A Fun (Successful) Way to Promote Social Engagement

Once I got into the world of marketing something changed in my day-to-day life.  Well, a lot of things changed, but I’m talking about the thousands of marketing messages I was hit with a day. They stopped passing me by without recognition.  I started analyzing the aspects of them; what worked and why.  The same thing continues to happen as I get more and more invested in social media and inbound marketing as a whole.

The other day I stumbled across a piece of content that donned an untraditional way to promote social engagement.

Instead of this:

I saw this:

These social engagement options came at the end of a LinkedIn piece by Steve Tappin titled, “Who Has 1 Billion Users and is About to Overtake Facebook?” The post is about emerging social messaging platforms that are seeing a tremendous increase in users.

At first, I thought Steve was trying to cheat the system.  Trying to get more likes, comments, etc. in some sort of voting scheme.

However, what Steve has done is tie those social engagement options into the actual content of the piece. He’s basically telling you how to use the traditional engagement options in relation to himself as a content creator and his article. He’s promoting positive engagement and letting readers know where they can go to find similar content.

Social sharing options are almost like those thousands of marketing messages we see everyday; they are everywhere now so they don’t have as much of an impact.

What Steve has done here is pull them out of the piece and add some instructions next to each creating captivating content that draws you in.

I stumbled across this post while perusing my suggested LinkedIn news.  (FYI- I find LinkedIn provides incredibly valuable content if you are looking for expert information in your industry.)  You can see why the catchy title caught my eye. Clearly Steve knows what he’s doing when it comes to marketing his content.

Did Steve’s technique to promote social engagement work?

The numbers speak for themselves…