Social sharing has been around years ago. It is meant to increase the visibility of your content – whether it’s from your blog, money site, or social media page.
However, increasing the number of social shares for your content is not really an area where most online marketers or bloggers excel at. In fact, reaching a measly 50 shares for a single content can be gruelling especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
But with the help of this article, you can garner over 100 social shares for your content. So stay awhile and read on.
Gearing Up to 100+ Social Shares
You need a lot more than just installing social sharing buttons for your blog content to accumulate shares, increase visibility, and attract traffic – a whole lot more. In fact, you’ll need to do about 10 things that span different aspects of your online presence from on-site optimizations to outreach tactics.
First, let’s start with the absolute basics:
Use Compelling Headlines – Coming up with a good line is a great start for a highly shareable content. Thankfully, several years in social media services marketing have thought content creators the specific qualities of a compelling headline:
If possible, include the keywords “How To”, “You”, and “Your”.
Include actual numbers or percentage values.
Emphasize importance with words like “Crucial”, “Exceptional”, “Powerful”, “Highly-effective”, and so on.
Try to limit the headline to a maximum of 6 words.
Make Every Article a Masterpiece – A lot of internet marketers and bloggers are guilty of outsourcing freelance writers to provide them with consistent content. Unfortunately, most of them are not willing to pay for the best writers and settle for the average ones. Remember that your content represents your expertise. They are the building blocks that will establish your online authority. Make sure it has the following:
- Invaluable information with elaborate details
- Actionable steps with concrete instructions
- Finesse (Perfect grammar, humour, and flow)
- Enough content for the purposes above (about 2,000 words)
Optimize your Site – Another necessity for creating highly shareable content is to make sure your site is optimized for the best user experience. First, be sure that your site is responsive to smaller screens to accommodate mobile users.
Optimize your Sharing Buttons – In addition to a responsive site, you should also limit your social sharing buttons (use floating buttons) to the three sites with the most engagement to your business. These are usually Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Believe it or not, this increases the likelihood of shares by up to 11%. Moreover, you can increase the likelihood of re-tweets by adding a tweet-able quote with a tool like Click to Tweet.
Remind your Readers to Share – After being engaged in quality writing, your readers are now vulnerable to clever calls-to-action that will tell them what to do next. A simple reminder can get them to share your content in a heartbeat. Just be sure to ask with an approachable tone.
Next, here are tips that can increase your social shares with the use of external services, resources, or websites.
Join Triberr – Triberr is a new networking platform where bloggers can connect and promote each other’s content to a collective audience. Basically, you can join a tribe where members can share other qualified members’ posts to their social media reach. Another advantage of Triberr is that not everyone is aware of its traffic-generating potential, so your competition is probably not using it…yet.
Use Just Retweet – JustRetweet is a service that works quite similar to Triberr. It is a network of bloggers who tweet each other’s content for increased exposure. You can maximize this by using popular hashtags that are relevant to your niche.
Do a Roundup – An effective strategy for attracting shares tied to your brand is to write a roundup post. A roundup post contains links to a collection of content from different sources. For example, a “top 15 SEO tools” post with links to the mentioned resources is an example of a roundup post. One advantage of a roundup post is that the people who were mentioned are likely to share your post to their audience – giving your content more publicity.
Share on Instagram – Here’s a quick fact: Instagram has a 1.53% user interaction rate, which is significantly higher than Facebook that’s sitting at 0.10%. You can take advantage of this by starting your own Instagram account and then stimulate re-shares by providing posts that your ideal audience wants.
Enable Comments via Social Media – Adopt a social media strategy to maximize the exposure of your content and the engagement of your audience by enabling comments via social media like Facebook. Remember that this requires familiarity with basic coding (you only need to slip in the code when it’s done). You can refer to online guides on adding Facebook comments to your blog content for step-by-step instructions.
Going Further
The steps above should be enough to help you get 100+ shares for your content. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are several other things you can do to encourage your audience to share your content and maximize visibility. Here are some other things that might help you accomplish your objectives:
Post at the Right Time – When sharing your content on several social media platforms, pay attention to the known best times of activity. For example, Facebook users share the most at 1 PM, while Google+ and Twitter’s are at 9AM-11AM and 5 PM, respectively.
Offer Free Stuff – A straightforward strategy is to offer something free in exchange for a share. One method is to hold Twitter sweepstakes and inform your audience that each re-tweet counts as an entry. You can pretty much watch the re-tweets flow in at this point.
Acknowledge Shares – You can further encourage social sharing by showing your appreciation to those who’ve already shared your content. It doesn’t have to be anything grand. Just send a public tweet or status update of you saying thanks to sharers.
