Good points, John. Some companies don’t really benefit from a social presence — although it’s important to test and see what works.

Just curious — you mentioned that “there is more to content than just well-crafted, useful information.” What else would you include?

Thanks!

There’s still power in niche content marketing!

– Sean

PS: Happy Thanksgiving!

On the other hand, if you sell software for mining engineers to use during their work day then your content is still going to be shareable and those shares are still going to be worth something, but only within a much narrower context. Here, 8 shares that go out to your customers is probably not too shabby.

Then there are topic areas like furniture, pest control, removalists, funerals, home air conditioning and other such things that few buyers take a continuing interest in. The normal customer behaviour in these markets is to become interested in content when actively researching a purchase and then to get on with the rest of their lives once they’ve blown their load. Even great content around furniture is unlikely to be very shareable, because even if the reader loves it, they are unlikely to expect their friends or followers would be interested. To the extent that you can get shares for this kind of content, these shares are probably not going to reach most of your prospective customers because they’re just not following “industry influencers” in the first place. If you really were trying to create viral content for this kind of business, it would probably be by pushing a novelty or gimmick angle really hard to make something that’s just really entertaining – this might be worthwhile to get a bit of brand visibility and some white hat links coming in, but for the most part I don’t think it makes sense for this sort of business to be too concerned about shares because it’s just not where the buyers are going to come from. It makes a lot more sense to write content around buying keywords and then promote it on the SERPS with white hat links that will ideally also bring referral traffic from customers actively researching a purchase.