With rising number of social media platforms, we should not be surprised if the total number of social media users might exceed the total world population.

Social media users’ constant engagement in various ways has opened up new opportunities for brands and marketers. reactive sharing refers to people’s reactions (of sharing it) to different content that they come across the web.

Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers has shared four ways marketers can exploit this reactive sharing attitude of the social media population.

DeMers says, “What can you do, as a content marketer, to take advantage of this trend?

1. Focus your attention on headlines. The biggest takeaway here is that your headline is often more important than the rest of your article; even if you spend several hours or several hundred dollars developing the core content of your piece, a user may quickly reject it or share it, based on the headline alone. Accordingly, you should spend at least as much time polishing the headline as you do the rest of your content.

2. Tell a story. It’s also useful if your headline can tell a complete (or semi-complete) story on its own. For example, IFLScience once published an article titled, “Marijuana Contains ‘Alien DNA’ From Outside of Our Solar System, NASA Confirms.” Despite getting more than 168,000 shares and attracting more than its fair share of comments, the headline was completely untrue, serving only as a social experiment to see how many people would engage in conversation about a nonexistent topic (based on a headline alone)”.

The Reactive Sharing Epidemic On Social Media (And How To Exploit It)