How to Increase Your Social Shares
Social media marketing can accomplish a great deal for a brand like increasing its online visibility, allowing a brand to interact directly with its customers and users, and is a dynamic tool with which to manage a company’s PR. However, none of the above matters if your posts, videos, pics, and tweets aren’t getting shared by influencers, brand evangelists, and most importantly, users who don’t usually share a company’s digital content. Following up on past posts on this topic, here are several additional ways to increase your social shares.
First off, picking a topic that is of particular relevance to your community and/or is trending is a great jumping off point to engage users on a topic they might feel passionately about. For example, with the NBA finals recently taking place, if your company is in San Francisco or Cleveland, posting a message in support of your home team will resonate with your local users and customers as it is a topic they are likely already discussing. Using a tool like BuzzSumo to see which topics are trending at a certain time is a solid shortcut to uncovering the topics that’s get people talking and sharing.
Another simple but essential step that many brands often overlook is enabling social sharing on your blog. That means if you don’t have a Facebook “like” widget or a retweet button amongst other social platform widgets, your content will likely never leave your site. But by enabling sharing on the page itself, you not only increase your social shares but also send a strong SEO signal to Google if your content is heavily shared via social media.
Our next two points deal with the notorious short attention span of online users. Firstly, your headline needs to be to the point but also descriptive so that a user can infer enough about the story to determine whether it is of relevance to him or her. Using the second-person in your headline, like “13 Things You Would Never Guess Improve Search Rankings” pulls the reader in with a clear summary of what the article is about.
In addition to a strong headline, ideally with a target keyword or phrase inserted into it, having compelling visual content is increasingly important when it comes to standing out from the tens of thousands of articles and blogs that are published daily. Consider investing in a subscription to a stock photos service like Shutterstock in addition to sourcing exciting imagery marked for reuse via Google’s image search. If you have a graphic designer in house, creating an original graphic or image with text on it is another solid way to earn more shares on social media.
Of course, the number of shares you get often depends on the network itself and how well you tailor your content to its core users. So whether you’re aiming for the majority with FB, the younger generation with Twitter, or the professionals and businesses on LinkedIn, tweak your post accordingly!
