Does Your Content Pass the Resharing Test?

Cultivate Your Brand Cult

Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick, the marketing power duo behind Canva‘s social, are releasing a book in early December, entitled The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users. Their goal? To share those social media tips that will be, for the most part, timeless.
Guy, for example, explains his reshare test: “You should post stuff that you believe your followers will find so compelling that they will share it to their followers.” And if this piece of content doesn’t pass the test as something you yourself would reshare, then don’t post it. It’s that simple. This is the biggest mistake, he says, that digital marketers make other than not making enough use of visual content.
If you have great content, Peg says, “You can’t just share it once. It’s not enough.” She is not saying, however, to simply schedule tweet after tweet saying, “Buy my new book on Amazon.” That’s not adding value for anyone.
But if you’ve written a great blog post, don’t just tweet out that link once or post it on Google Plus one time. Schedule a few posts, 8 hours apart. If you’re squeamish about re-posting the same thing, change up the copy. But if your content is excellent, then you should make sure your followers know about it!
And if you’re following Guy’s reshare rule, then by definition you are only posting amazing content. These two strategies are a major one-two punch of social media success.
The book doesn’t tell you how you must do social media; instead, it gives very specific, practical suggestions based on what has worked in Guy’s and Peg’s experiences in the field.

Democracy in the Digital World

Guy wrote a book in 2012 about self-publishing, APE: How to Publish a Book, but this new book he wrote with Peg is being released by a publisher. It’s ironic, but it’s not hypocritical.
They submitted this book to Penguin on a lark, and they had two factors going in their favor thanks to self-publishing. First, Penguin saw that Guy’s two prior self-published books had seen success, making The Art of Social Media a less risky investment. Second, they couldn’t low-ball Guy and Peg with an unreasonable offer because Penguin knew the book would get published with or without a traditional publisher. “Self-publishing has really leveled the playing field,” Guy says.
Facebook, originally a level playing field, has been going the opposite direction recently: choking organic page reach and the recent announcement that they’ll be minimizing organic reach for strictly promotional posts. At the same time, Google Plus continues to be a worthwhile investment of time. Guy is a strong proponent of the platform. The usage rate isn’t growing as quickly as Google would like, but they are definitely playing the long game with Google Plus. And moreover, “the community that remains there is super loyal and super active.”
Don’t avoid using it simply because you’re not as familiar or aren’t sure where to start. That’s where experts like Guy and Peg have lots of advice to get you started.