Simple Tactics to Increase Your Social Media Shares

Part of building up your audience is getting people to engage with and share your content. This means spending time creating content that resonates with your network and entices them to share. In this post I’ll go over some simple tactics to help you increase your social media shares.

12 Simple Tactics to Increase Your Social Media Shares

1. Share Content More than Once

One of the best ways to get more content shares is to share the content more than once. Use a different photo, and change the caption up but lead to the same article. Getting in the habit of sharing content more than once also lets you get to know what kind of images, messaging and hashtags work with your audience, and can help determine when your audience is the most active.

2. Create Content that Adds Value to Your Customer

People won’t care to share things that don’t add value to their life. This can mean informing them about unexpected ways to use your product, or just giving them a beautiful photo to look at. This means figuring out what matters to your audience, from what activities their involved in to what they do in their spare time.

3. Create “Snackable” Content

Snackable content is content created around sharing information in a quick and easily digestible form. This makes it ideal for sharing a lot of information in a small amount of room. Snackable content includes quotes, infographics, and stats. Get creative in the way the information is presented. To learn more about snackable content read: How to Create Snackable Content

4. Share Posts When Followers are Active

Figuring out when your followers are online and active is essential to getting the most impact out of each of social media post. Use in network analytics tools (like the new Twitter Dashboard) to help you determine which time your audience is on. You can also use third party tools to calculate when your audience is on.

5. Provide Context in Headlines/Messaging

Your headline can make or break your readers’ choice to click through to your article or blog post. Make sure headlines and messaging offer context into what the reader will get out of the content. Use action and descriptive words to entice readers to interact with you. Never exaggerate the benefits of your post, or be misleading – that will only hurt you as readers will not trust your content anymore.

6. Make Social Media Share Buttons Easy to Find

Your follow and share buttons should be easily found on your site. Popular places for these buttons are website headers, footers, or in sidebars. Your post itself should include social media sharing buttons. Another thing to remember is to clearly mark which buttons do what on your site. Confusion on which buttons do what won’t encourage people to share.

7. Add Sharing Buttons and Light Boxes to Your Website Articles and Posts.

I use AddThis.com for the floating share bar you see on my blog. SumoMe also provides a slew of tools to make your website social media friendly.

8. Pre-Populate Share Messaging

The less work your readers and sharers have to do the better! Some social media share services will allow you to populate your own messaging and hashtags into shares. If your service does not allow you to adjust captions make sure you adjust elements appropriately to pull your post title and tag your handle. Don’t forget the same goes for emails and newsletters as well.

9. Photos Matter

Try to include a good image in your post. Some sites, like Pinterest or Facebook will pull the post’s featured image – and including images increases shares. Here are a few ways to create visual content on the go. If you are using a photo to promote your content make sure the photo is sized correctly for the specific network you’re sharing it on.

10. Try “Click to Tweet” Options

Click to Tweet lets you choose parts of your post that your reader can simply click on to tweet. I love this option because it allows you to pull snippets from text and is easy for the reader to use. I use a plugin, but if your site isn’t on WordPress you can try ClickToTweet.com or run Google search for click to tweet services.

11. Use Calls to Action

Take it back to old fashioned called to action. Ask your audience (nicely) to share your post if they’ve enjoyed it. Include this messaging in landing pages.

12. Share Lifestyle and Related Content from Other Sources

Customers don’t necessarily always want to hear about you. Break up posts with shares from related brands or lifestyle content. Even if a piece of content that isn’t yours gets a slew of shares, this still brings visibility to your account. Lifestyle content can include quotes, industry stats, or images and videos that relate to your target audience. These types of images tend to get re-shared and interacted with more often that other more brand related material. Not sure what lifestyle content is? Read up and get some lifestyle content ideas here.

BONUS:

Get an initial boost from friends, family and employees.

Increasing social media shares on your website, posts or campaign requires well thought out (preferably brand related) content that adds value, messages that entices sharing, and making these pieces easy to share. I know, easier said than done – but well worth the effort when you see the shares start coming in. Have a question? Leave it in a comment below.

This article was originally posted here.

Source: B2C