Why Your PDFs Need Embedded Sharing Options

• Make it easy for others to share your content

Every company produces PDFs for white papers, case studies, best practices, social media releases, etc; however, more often than not, recipients of these documents are not given an easy way to share the content within. This can be a major hindrance to spreading whatever message the PDF is meant to share. Galen de Young of MarketingProfs recently put together an excellent posting in which he explains how and why all of your PDFs going forward should have several embedded options for consumers to easily pass along. Simply by making it an option, your message will reach more people. After all, the time, energy, and cost of just getting your message to the right people is difficult enough, so why not maximize your efforts? Here are a couple tips Young points to in order to make sure this happens.

• Pre-populate your messages

In the case of Twitter sharing, make sure your audience gets a pre-populated tweet once they click on this particular sharing option. That way, instead of making them take the extra step of shortening a URL or putting together relevant text to go along with the link, you’ve already made it as simplistic as possible. Remember, the key is convenience. No one wants to go out of their way to do your work for you. An added bonus of this feature is that you can track the results of your message by creating an account with a URL shortening service that will provide you the statistics, such as bit.ly.

• Track the results of user sharing.

As mentioned above, it’s important to go with a URL-shortening service that will provide you with statistics as to which PDFs are being shared and which ones aren’t. By doing this, you’ll be able to know how many people clicked on the shortened URL, allowing you to see which PDFs are more successful than others in terms of sharing. Also, make sure that your pre-populated message has relevant hash tag markers (ie, #pharma) so that users who re-post will not only share with their followers, but will also make the information accessible to those who run a specific search within Twitter.

Make this a priority as you begin to produce more PDFs. As Young says, “embedding sharing options not only helps with the launch of new content marketing assets, but it also helps perpetuate their visibility as new people find and share them long after they’ve been released.” The time is takes to accomplish this feature will be well worth the results. Read more of Young’s article here.