Think about the last time you went beyond liking something online and actually sent it to someone. What was share-worthy about it? Maybe it sparked joy, piqued your curiosity, or taught you something new worth passing along to a friend. That’s the power of highly shareable content. When the message is compelling, people naturally want to pass it along.
While there is no set formula for creating shareable content, there are some simple basics that can help drive more organic traffic to your blog posts, video content, and social media posts. Understanding the building blocks of shareable content helps you better inspire your target audience to spread your message.
This guide breaks down what makes content worth sharing and how you can create your own engaging posts.
What is shareable content?
Shareable content is designed to motivate others to share it, often because it’s so funny, relevant, smart, captivating, or perfectly distilled that they want their friends to see it too. It’s a digital form of word-of-mouth marketing. When users share content with their social networks, they’re tying their own reputation and approval to the idea or product.
Shareable content formats include videos, memes, podcasts, blogs, and even infographics—so long as it’s engaging. When done right, shareable content sparks fresh conversations, encourages engagement from your existing audience, and reaches new customers organically through social networks.
7 types of shareable content
Here are seven types of content that have a high potential for sharing:
Memes
Memes are a type of comedic visual content that tells a joke by pairing words and an image, often tapping into cultural moments.
Taco Bell leverages humor across all of its social accounts and regularly customizes memes. On X, in particular, the brand takes a simple but effective approach with pithy one-liners that its audience loves to share. In this post, it innocently pokes fun at the “live, laugh, love” adage by giving it a funny twist with two activities many people might enjoy: leaving work early and grabbing a snack.
live, laugh, leave work early for taco bell
— Taco Bell (@tacobell) October 9, 2025
Infographics
Infographics translate data or complex ideas into visual elements that are easy to understand. People reshare them when the information is useful, surprising, or informative. Experiment with creating simple infographics that also encourage comments, as Quip has done effectively with its “Build your vacation” Instagram post.
Other brands can benefit from posting helpful information about related interests. Blueland, the zero-waste cleaning product brand, does this by posting sustainability-related infographics that spark conversation and awareness.
Videos
About 95% of internet users worldwide watch online videos every month, making them one of the most popular shareable content types. When it comes to brands, videos can often be a vehicle for product explanations, behind-the-scenes footage, and user-generated content (UGC) from fans.
The home appliance brand Ninja does a great job of making clear, simple recipe videos for its ice cream makers. Take one of its Ninja Cream Instagram Reels, with more than 1,300 shares for how to make hot chocolate protein ice cream. The straightforward title that tells you what you’re watching and the aesthetic shots of assembling the ingredients keep it visually interesting. It’s informative while also promoting a giveaway collaboration with Ritual protein powder.
Interactive content
Whether through a poll on social media or a quiz on a website, content that involves audience participation can grab attention and start conversations. People may send interactive content like this to their friends to compare results. Spotify’s annual Wrapped content series is a prime example of highly shareable interactive content. Smaller brands can just as easily engage audiences by posting polls and asking short-answer questions via Instagram Stories.
Podcasts
Branded podcasts can turn thought-leadership into share-worthy content. If you record video of your podcasts, you can also push out clips via Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts. Shopify, for example, has a Shopify Masters podcast on which merchants share their successes, tips, and struggles. Through the podcast, Shopify shares useful insights from real people, endearing potential customers to the platform without making a direct sales pitch.
Curated content
Curating content relevant to a specific audience drives shares by giving people material tailor-made for their interests. Hyper-relevant content makes some viewers more likely to pass it along to others who care about the same things. When you repost content from customers, influencers, or thought leaders (with their permission, of course), it fosters community and encourages further sharing.
For example, Fenty Beauty shares videos made by influencers with both big and small follower counts to show how the product appears in the real world. In this Instagram Reel, an influencer shares what she loves about a new lip gloss set from her car. It shows Fenty followers that you don’t have to have a professional studio setup to advocate for the brand and get recognition for it.
Blogs
Blogs allow you to share tips, tell a good story, and put your thought-leadership into writing. Compelling blog content, paired with optimization for search engine rankings, can be a powerful combination for garnering more shares.
Take the cycle tracking company Natural Cycles as an example. The platform consistently gives its audience actionable advice, both on its social media accounts and on its website. One of the blog articles offers women helpful information on perimenopause symptoms and a how-to guide to manage them. The unified illustration style is a subtle visual cue that the other blog posts are just as thoughtful and worth sharing.
Tips for creating shareable content
- Be authentic
- Aim for clarity
- Try humor
- Make it actionable
- Create visual appeal
- Plan your hooks
- Optimize for search engines
There are plenty of ways to give your content the best chance of becoming shareable. Here are some tips and best practices to help you create content worth sharing:
Be authentic
On social media platforms, half of consumers consider influencer authenticity as a top quality. For your brand, maybe that looks like giving your audience a behind-the-scenes look at your service or product. It could also be sharing customer stories or creating content people can relate to on an emotional level.
For example, Aliyah Marandiz, founder of sugaring paste company Sugardoh, leaned into authenticity to create content in preparation for her Shark Tank debut. As she explains on Shopify Masters, “It was me practicing in the bathroom two days before pitching. I was sugaring my armpits like I normally do, and I’m all disheveled. I’m sleep deprived.”
When she juxtaposed the video of her final pitch on the show with her bathroom prep video, it went viral, garnering more than 860 shares on Instagram. It led to just as many sales as when she debuted on Shark Tank.
“People want to see reality, not reality TV,” she says.
Aim for clarity
Get your point across quickly. Distill the point of your social media video into a several-second compelling hook. If you’re working on a blog, make sure the articles focus on one or two compelling points. Write them in a scannable, visually engaging way with clear, memorable takeaways that readers will want to pass along.
Try humor
If it aligns with your brand or makes sense for your content, you can offer unique angles through comedy. People love sharing relatable jokes or humorous takes on trending topics. Research confirms that funny memes often help with enhancing engagement on social media.
Humor can sometimes be risky, so be sure it aligns with your audience and the current cultural landscape. Keep the jokes light and rooted in relatable truths that make sense for your brand or content, like skipping workout jokes for a fitness brand or new mom humor for a baby brand.
Bidet company Tushy, for example, could have played it safe and shied away from bathroom humor, but decided to go all-in. Its Instagram posts often get many shares by tapping into the honest truths of going to the bathroom. One recent Reel went truly viral with nearly 40,000 shares when it spoke to the relief felt after going to the bathroom.
Make it actionable
Give your audience actionable advice they can implement immediately. This provides value for them and can inspire people that they share your content with too. Offer solutions to pain points that customers can implement instantly, like simple tips for improving your style or top books to read for business.
Create visual appeal
Eye-catching visuals or well-edited videos encourage engagement. In fact, content on social media platforms with visuals is 40% more likely to be shared than content without. Even your blog posts can incorporate visual elements like infographics. Beginner-friendly tools like Canva and CapCut can help you create content that gets people talking.
Canned beans are probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of visual appeal, but that’s what co-founders Kat Kavner and Jamie Lynne Tulley set out to change with Heyday Canning. One way they brought that to life was through a “Bean Swap” pop-up in New York, where they invited visitors to trade any can of beans they owned for a new can of Heyday beans.
Their goal was to design an experience so fun and visually unique that people couldn’t resist sharing it or the content that came out of it. The event was successful, with a hard-to-forget execution that had all the key characteristics of shareable content: bright colors, playful branding, and fun.
“We really wanted to create an experience we felt had a high probability that people would capture and create UGC if they went,” Kat explained on Shopify Masters.
Every part of the experience was “TikTok bait.”
Plan your hooks
This tip applies particularly to video content. A hook is text, audio, or a visual that immediately grabs attention in an intriguing way. For example, you could speak about incredible business results in a short amount of time, like “We sold out in less than 24 hours. Here’s how.”
Other common hook structures include establishing serialized content, like “Day one of sharing Thanksgiving recipes.” Alternatively, clearly set up a problem and share how you solved it. Hooks are all about distilling the point of your content into something surprising that gets people to stick around.
One common hook strategy is reacting to other videos with your own perspective, which fitness wearable brand Whoop does effectively. It often starts with a hot take from an influencer followed by its own scientific expert’s comment on it. This creates valuable and educational content that not only hooks their viewers but gets them to hit the Share button hundreds of times.
Optimize for search engines
In order for anyone to share your content, they have to discover it first. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be an effective strategy to boost your content’s chances of appearing in search results.
Here are some strategies for different platforms:
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Social media. When optimizing social media SEO, use relevant keywords in your captions. You can do this by typing the words you want to use into the platform’s native search engine and researching how top posts use them.
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Website. To help your website rank higher when someone inputs a search query, you can turn to tools like Moz or Semrush to research which words align best with the customers you want to reach.
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Blog. Much like websites, blog SEO also leverages relevant keywords. You can use the same keyword research tools used for websites to find keywords related to your products or business.
Shareable content FAQ
What type of content is most shareable?
There’s no single content type guaranteed to be the most shareable, but most shareable content has some of the same key characteristics: clarity, surprise, actionability, and emotion.
How do you make an Instagram post shareable?
To make an Instagram post shareable, it’s key to grab your audience’s attention early with a clear hook and ensure that the content has visual appeal. You can also use Instagram’s tools, like polls and quizzes, to ask surprising questions that your audience may want to get their friends to partake in.
How do you create highly shareable content?
Creating highly shareable content starts with knowing your audience—what they care about, what problems they want solved, and what sparks emotion or curiosity. Focus on delivering immediate value, whether through a surprising insight, a useful tip, or a relatable story. Keep the format easy to consume with clear structure, strong visuals, and concise copy. Make it feel worth passing along by offering something that helps your reader look informed, entertained, or helpful when they share it.
