A Simple Ninja Tactic To Building Trust Through Sharing

Sharing great content through social media channels is the single-most effective way to build trust in online communities. I’ve explained before that my Twitter strategy, and thus tremendous growth of the number of followers over the years, has been simple: share good shit. But building a network of trust to that level, however, takes time. Is there a way to jump start your trust building and get more people interested in what you do faster?

Maybe.

I’ve shared with you before that I am honored to serve on the Board of Directors for the National Center for Family Literacy. As I’m consuming content from blogs, newspapers and more, I’ll make a note of interesting articles that have to do with education and literacy issues. Sometimes, I share them in the traditional way – by posting links on Twitter or on the Social Media Explorer Facebook Page.

But the audiences there don’t necessarily look for literacy information from me. My Twitter and Facebook followers look to me for social media, public relations and digital marketing expertise. While literacy articles might be of occasional interest to them, relevancy becomes a question.

The audience that will find that content relevant can be found on the networks for the NCFL. So, I jump over and share the links on the NCFL Facebook Page.

This does a couple of things for me while doing something for NCFL and its audience:

1. It gives the literacy-interested audience good content to consume
2. It gives NCFL an extra hand with putting interesting content on their social pages for their audience
3. It attracts people perhaps not currently in my audience to find out who I am and potentially become members of my tribe, particularly if I share content consistently
4. It builds a level of trust in me from the audience and organization

The catch to doing this is that if you do it too much, or at least skirt the boundaries of what is really relevant to the audience on those networks, you can easily deteriorate your trust, too. So it must be done with care. Self-promoting in this fashion, in my opinion, is almost a no-no. The occasional link to your own blog is probably okay, but only if it’s ideally relevant to the topic or conversation at hand.

If the other content you find is relevant to the audience, shared with being helpful at its center and isn’t at a volume that can come across as noisy compared to other messages shared there from either the brand or other users, you will expand your trust building through sharing in a way you may not have thought of before.

If you regularly find good content on digital marketing, public relations, social media and communications, I’d be thrilled if you shared it on the Social Media Explorer Facebook Page. It will help you build trust with my audience there and perhaps lead them to be in yours as well.

Other thoughts? Have you tried sharing with communities other than yours? Tell us about it in the comments.