If you want people to share your content, you need to make it easy for them to do it.
This is one of the main reasons why I see low engagement on social media for certain companies.
Shares on social media can help get your content in front of new eyes, increase your brand’s credibility and even impact SEO.
However, your shares increase if you’re not making your content easy to share and ensuring that your content is valuable and relevant to your audience.
Here’s how you can encourage social sharing:
Create helpful, interesting content.
This should go without saying, but I still see companies and individuals post boring or self-promotional content. Good content is really the most important way to achieve social media success.
Add social sharing buttons to your content. Social sharing buttons should be on all of your web site and blog pages to encourage readers to easily share your content.
Include Click to Tweet links within the body of your content. This is a great way to make it easy for people to share snippets of your posts.
(Don’t just include buttons and links, however – prompt people to use this tool by leveraging the power of asking every now and then.)
Consider that people might prefer sharing with their own social scheduling tool and ensure your content is optimized accordingly.
- Simple ways you can increase the social sharing of your posts
Include:
- A catchy headline (it will likely be pulled in with the metadata for the preview link)
- A well-written and well-optimized meta description
- A compelling image (or set of images)
Finally, rely on your employees to help get the ball rolling with social shares.
Show your employees how easy it is to share with step-by-step instructions. (I find a quick Zoom training where we walk through the process together really helps).
Keep them in the loop by sending the content you’d like them to share in a daily email or via a group chat on Slack/Teams.
Include sample introductory text (there’s nothing worse than sharing a post without intro text) and hashtags to use. Encourage them to edit the text in their own voice.
How have you increased social shares?
Follow me on YouTube for more tips.
Here’s a video on how to increase your social shares.