The Best Ways To Increase Your Social Media Shares
Posting content and writing updates on social media is generally an easy process, but getting your posts out there is only half the battle. How can you increase the amount of people who see these posts and encourage them to share the posts with their followers? The task of getting new retweets, re-pins and re-grams may be easier than you think once you know the actions to take in order to persuade people to repost your content, so we’ve put together a useful list of the best way to increase your social media shares in order to help.
Find Your Audience
Making sure you have the right audience is one of the key points that will help you increase social media shares. If none of your followers are interested in your content, or you are targeting the wrong people, you’ll find your efforts are going to waste. There are a number of ways to find the right audience for you but one of the easiest and best is to search for keywords relevant to you and your content on each social network. This will enable you to find the people who are posting about similar topics and find out who they follow, who follows them and the hashtags they use in order to get their posts seen.
Use Hashtags
Using hashtags appropriately can increase your social media shares and followers as they allow you to tap into an already present audience and get your posts noticed. Hashtags should be used sparingly and appropriately- there is nothing worse than trying to read a tweet or Instagram caption that is packed full of randomly hashtagged words. Select the most relevant hashtags wisely and use them at the end of your posts or place one or two within the text, this will allow your posts to show up in hashtag feeds without annoying your current followers.
Create and Post Shareable Images
There are a number of statistics relating to the amount of extra shares you can create on Twitter by using images along with your tweets and links. The highest number we’ve seen is an increase in retweets of 150% and while this may seem inflated, there is no doubt that uploading images along with your social posts can increase your share rates by an unlimited amount. Add relevant images along with your posts on Facebook and Twitter, and don’t forget to use interesting and attractive images that will work well on image based sharing sites like Pinterest.
Make Sharing Easy
If you have a website or write a blog, making posting your content to social media sites easy is a great way to increase social shares. Include sharing icons at the top and bottom of your pages, but make sure that you don’t have so many icons for obscure networks that it puts people off.
Adding a ‘Pin It’ button to your website will make sharing your images to Pinterest more simple for your visitors as they can pin without having to leave your site- remember to give your images great titles as this is what will populate the description field when your photos are shared.
Repurpose Your Content
If you write regular articles or blog posts then repurposing your content can be a great way to increase shares on social media sites that you may have missed the first time around. Repurposing can be as easy as tweeting about an old blog post with a rewritten headline or asking a question about the topic of the post. Taking the main points from your article and publishing them to Facebook along with a link can also be a great way to increase social shares, as can making a collage of all images from the article and sharing them to Instagram or Pinterest.
Leverage Pinterest Search
In order for your pins and boards to appear in relevant searches on Pinterest, you need to give them the best chance. Make sure all your boards are correctly categorised and give them interesting descriptions that use relevant keywords. When pinning make sure to give the image a thoughtful description including keywords and opinions, and do the same for re-pins too- posting a description that someone else has written gives you no chance to stand out or include the searchable phrases that will help gain you more Pinterest shares.
Share and Share Alike
How can you expect others to share your content if you never share anything from anyone else? Apart from appearing on the notifications feeds of the people you enjoy and admire, reposting from other people can make your own feed more interesting and lively while building a community feel that will encourage others to repost from you. Giving your followers the impression that you are not only out to get your own content noticed but to actively participate in distributing interesting information will encourage them to take notice of your social media profiles.
Thank People for Sharing
Thanking people for sharing your posts and content will show them that you are grateful and care. If you don’t have the time to write personalised comments thanking the person for their social share, then a like, favourite or follow will let them know that you’re listening to your audience. This may encourage them to repost from you more often.
Cross Promote
Promoting your other networks can be a great way to increase followers and shares on social networks as the people who are already interested in what you have to say are likely to want to see more from you. Occasionally posting links to your profiles on other sites is a great way to encourage people to check out your posts and share the things they like.
Add Links to Your Signature
Adding your social media links to your email signature can get your content in front of new people and is a great way to get more shares. Including a call to action such as ‘follow me on..’, ‘connect with me’ or ‘tweet me at…’ can also give people more of a push to click these links, and as you’re already conversing with them you know that they’ll be interested in your content.
