Make Your Content More Shareable!
It’s time to think beyond the basic social sharing buttons that everyone has on their website, and make it easier and more fun for your readers to share your content for you.
This doesn’t mean you should remove the social media sharing buttons from your site. It just means that there are other ways to drive social networking engagement that not everyone is using. And the more methods you employ, the more chance your content will get shared, and that people will sign up to your freebies!
Get People Sharing Useful Info From Your Blog Posts & Webinars
Website plug-ins that allow your readers to “Click to Tweet” and share your information dramatically improve the chances that your content is getting shared.
Basically, the idea is that you take a memorable quote or summary of advice from a great blog post, and put it into a little, noticeable box that says “click to tweet”. The plugin makes this really easy, and the result is that your followers don’t just share a boring link to your post, they share a really useful nugget of information with their followers that leads back to your site. Another win/ win!
And if you’re running a live webinar or workshop, don’t forget hashtags! Ask your viewers to use a specific hashtag for your workshop and share any useful nuggets they’ve learned. This is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your brand and to encourage even more people to sign up for your webinar!
Visuals
Visuals matter more and more, so you want to make sure that you have really shareable images. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest all, frustratingly, require different image sizes to get the best results. The good news is that software like Canva makes it easy to create a good looking image for every blog post you create, and save it in all the correct sizes. You can then use the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure that the correct image gets shared depending on which social media site your followers post to. Pretty nifty, huh?
Smarter Social Updates
Of course, this is about growing your list from social media, not a what you should post on social media. But the golden rule is that, the more useful you are on social media, the more people will share your stuff. Buffer lets you share your blog or website content to multiple social networks at once. You can even schedule your post or tweet deliveries well in advance, to save you time.
Bit.ly increases your Twitter conversions by letting you create short, customizable links rather than long URLs that look ugly, and eat up your character limits on Twitter. Window Resizer will check your tweets, posts and updates on any screen size. This guarantees your content always looks good, regardless whether it is being viewed on a smartphone, laptop or desktop PC.
Don’t forget hashtags! On Google+, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram adding a “#” before a word or phrase helps drive viewability. Your post that includes #BlueberryMuffinRecipes will show up higher in social media search requests than posts about blueberry muffin recipes that do not use that hash tag. This is a great idea if you are trying to attract attention locally or regionally. Place the hash tag “#” before your city name to attract local attention.
If you want to understand the analytics behind your hash tags, Ritetag provides instant analysis of the hash tag you Tweet.
And, to see how it’s all working out, Social Analytics provides a breakdown of your share statistics on any page of your website or blog. Awesome Screenshot lets you “capture, annotate, and share your screen” quickly and easily. All of these strategies, plug-ins and pieces of software ensure that you are creating the most shareable social network content, and that means building your list quickly and easily.27