8 Tips and Tricks to Increase Social Shares on Your Website
We all know that these days, one of the best ways to publicise your website and indeed increase the amount of traffic to your website is social media sharing. To be more specific, the best way is to optimise your social media sharing. In fact, it’s become so important that it is worth thinking about social media sharing as one of your first port of calls.
Therefore, we have come up with a list of some great tips and tricks to increase social shares on your website. These are things that you should about when writing your posts, think about when adding plugins to your website and more. So let’s get into tips and tricks to increase social share on your website.
Integrate Social Media Comments
One of the best ways to get your website onto social media is my incorporating Facebook or Google+ comments instead of having your own comments section. This way, these comments get shared onto the massive social media sharing web sites already without you have to show everyone else them. We’d personally recommend Facebook as you’re then commenting to a much larger audience, plus Facebook has the News Feed on the right that allows users to see when others comment on certain subjects, making it more likely that someone will see the comment.
Create Pre-Written Tweets
A great thing to do to increase your social media sharing is to provide pre-written tweets. What we mean by this is to set it up using something like Click To Tweet that allows to pre-programme in what content and what text will be in the box when users share your content. This can be altered to be the title of the blog post or it can be generic for the whole website. But we’d definitely recommend it, so it’s easier for followers to see where they’ve shared the content from.
Run a Giveaway Based On Social Media
One of the classic ways to get to your website or get wherever you want them really is to offer them the potential of winning something free if they do something for you. So why not offer your readers the chance to win something (preferably related to your content and something people actually want) and as entry into the prize draw, they have to share to as many websites as possible. A lot of sites use a token system in which you get 1 token into the prize draw for each social media site you share the content onto.
Write Specifically for Sharing
One way to increase the chance of social media sharing is to actually make the content that you’re writing “sharable”. If you find that write in such a way that people find it hard to quote from you or you write in such a way that you don’t get a single, more narrow view across then you’ll find that people will find it harder to share to social media. Begin to start trying to write in such a way that people will want to quote from your page as this is often what people go ahead and tweet.
Make Posts Easy to Skim
On top of that last point, making posts easier to skim through makes posts far easier to read and then share to social media. Some people love to read long-form text and then share that and let others spend a good 10 minutes reading it too. However, with the world of social media, if people are going to share website content, they’re more likely to share something their friends and family can quickly get the jist of without having to concentrate too hard.
Use Quotation Marks
Linking to that last two tips, a great way to get people to share your content is to include separate quotation marks. These are often segments from your block of text that summarise what you were trying to say. It’s a great way to not only allow viewers to get the general idea of the post easier but then also gives them something to quote on social media.
Know Your Timing
A key part of social media sharing is to know your timing. Without a doubt, certain social media shares will garner more attention at certain times than others. This can require a lot of trial and error and a lot of time to get this right, but once you’ve got it down, you can set up a service like Buffer to automatically post at these times and do your work for you.
Make Social Share Buttons Easy to Use
And finally, one of the key points to ensure that your content is easy to share and people WANT to share it, is to make your social media sharing buttons easy-to-access and attractive. There’s been a lot of work and studying from blog owners and website owners over the past couple of years on what social media buttons work the best. Some suggest the best way is to make the buttons as attractive, modern and sleek as possible as this will make people want to click them more. Others suggest to use sticky social media buttons that follow the user down the page, allowing them to share whenever they choose. Obviously you can try to combine the two, attractiveness and sticky.
