Which visitors are most likely to spread the word?

[Kay]

One way of increasing traffic to your site is to get people telling others about it. Therefore, it might be worth a shot to target at least some of your content towards the sharing types. But who are the sharing types?

I was thinking along the lines of "sharing" being social media. However, it could also include forums and maybe even email.

Next, I tried searching for info about who is most likely to share but I've not found anything particularly useful yet. In any case, if it turns out that the most likely to share are kids sharing cute pet pics, then I'm not wanting that kind of traffic anyway.

I guess I need to know who shares what and why, and from there select the possibilities which could be monetised.

Any ideas?

[cash ninja]

that's a good question and a really tricky one to answer I think.

I guess (and it is just a guess, based mostly on my own personal behaviour) that what you share will depend on the content and the audience you're sharing it with. For example the kind of things I tend to share on Facebook are music I like, articles to do with pollution/the environment/scuba diving and the odd amusing picture I might have taken with my camera phone (I took a picture of a wheely bin last night with the England flag on it, on my way to the pub to watch the football).

However, I wouldn't share articles about internet marketing, SEO or similar topics on Facebook but I might be more likely to do so on Google+, stumbleupon or an internet forum.

I don't know if I'm a great example though, because I'm very aware of what I'm sharing and who I'm sharing it with and I'm not sure that your average internet visitor would be.

At best sharing traffic could be very targeted because a visitor to your site sees something interesting and useful and shares it with someone they know, who they know will also find it interesting and useful and at worse it could be bored people sharing pictures of cats...

[KenW3]

This question reminds me of something I read recently on Seth Godin's blog (the guy who created Yoyodyne, Squidoo, and the (brilliant) Permission Marketing series) in an article titled: The unforgiving arithmetic of the funnel

Your question deals with the study of memes, and an Internet Meme is a very specific methodology of spreading thoughts for promotional purposes.

[DaveMurphy]

What about running a competition using twitter/facebook? Ask a question related to the niche get them to tweet answer in a particular format, have a draw for an amazon voucher or something like that. Generally I get the impression that most

Whole bunch of interesting ideas for competitions on ukwins dot co dot uk which also looks like it might potentially be a good place to help promote said competition.

There's also a new article just up on mashable that might have some relevance - http://mashable.com/2012/06/12/fans-...ds-capitalize/

[grynge]

An excellent question, and one I think really needs exploring.

I guess you need to start at the start and work out what the sites demographic is. Once you have that worked out would it be working out what part of that demographic is
1. Social network aware
2. Forum aware
3. Comment post aware (blogs/news etc etc)
4. Other types of sharing (pinterest, stumbleupon, digg etc etc)

once you boiled it down could you make posts/tools/pages that were specifically aimed at getting people to share on those mediums?

One other thing you would need to look at is how those mediums share as well. Stumbleupon seems to like sharing useful tools and free stuff without advertising. Facebook tends to be, local news/game/funny/cute/personal sharing. Twitter on the other hand seems to be niche news/local news/personal thoughts. So your overall share method may have to change for various types of users over different mediums.

[Kay]

I found this free report by Nielsen, which might be of some use. It's a few months old and it's very US-biased, but it does give some pointers as to which demographics are doing what sharing and where. No surprises there, really.

(Dunno if anyone has posted it before on EP but I didn't find it if they did.)

I like grynge's idea to figure out your site's demographic first and then target your content for them to share.