In today’s Web world, most of us journalists and content creators want what we produce to be shared. A share is one of the Web’s highest compliments, right next to a link. So how does this happen?

Well, it’s not easy to create sharable content. Why? It’s not an exact science. What strikes your audience as sharable one day might not work on the next. Frustrating? Maybe, but we encourage you to take that as a challenge.

On Labor Day, Steve and I collaborated on a post called “The changing face of journalism jobs.” To date, according to BackType, it’s our most shared post. We were thrilled at its success. Heck, if this were our post on news games, we’d be wearing newspaper sailor hats. But let’s not dwell on that missed opportunity for our audience... Instead, let’s focus on what Steve and I learned in creating that jobs post, why we think it was shared, and continues to be shared so much.

1. Be relevant. The post focused on jobs and was created on Labor Day. So the nature of what people do for a living was on the forefront of our readers' minds. The journalism industry itself is in an massive evolution, so journalists new and old want to know where they fit in. This post does that in a way. Plus, as Anna Tarkov pointed out, it may have been shared to cheer up a lot of out-of-work journalists.

2. Be able to change plans quickly. Steve and I had planned a different post for that day, but we ditched it when Steve realized a post about journalism jobs would be a better fit. He was right, and I’m glad we started from scratch on the jobs post.

3. Make it unique. Good, sharable content is core content, or the kind of content that is difficult for others to reproduce. Our own employment searches informed a lot of the post; we’ve seen the evolution of the journalism job market first hand.

4. Make sure your content can spark conversation. We made sure we included a lot of links in our post to give it more weight. We also included snippets of job ads. We wrote witty sub-heads and tried, as always, to create scannable, easy-to-read content. We were lucky Steve Buttry stopped by and added some links to related posts he had written in the comments. This really added value to what we wrote. All this contributes to content that can invite conversations and sharing.

5. Participate and Analyze. When we wrote that post, we really had no idea it would be so popular, but we’re glad people have found it valuable. We’ve made sure to thank the many of you who shared it. I would have thought our post about news site designs would have received more links and retweets than it did, but sometimes you can’t predict what readers will go for. You can only analyze, participate in conversations with them about what they want and react to those wants and needs. We’re always analyzing why things work the way they do (like this post!).

What can we add to this list? What makes content sharable?