How to Boost Social Media Sharing of Your Content

The competition is fierce on the Internet. If you take a look at the website Internet Live Stats, every second, there is a whopping number of content being shared each second. To mention a few: approximately 8,000 tweets sent, 800 Instagram photos uploaded, and 76,000 YouTube videos viewed—all in a span of a second. And that doesn’t include the number of blog posts written every day—a staggering 1.6 million blog posts!

With so much content being published daily, marketers and content creators are at a crux on how to make the most of their content marketing efforts. Adding to that dilemma is the decline of organic reach due to algorithm changes that not only affect Facebook but also other social media platforms, as well as the rise of private sharing.

Why Social Media Shares Matter

Getting your content seen by your target audience is essential to content marketing. However, your marketing efforts shouldn’t stop there. Marketers should also aim to expand your reach to audiences beyond your current followers to make the most of your digital marketing efforts, and social media shares play a big role in that aspect.

While social media share counts may be considered a vanity metric, its real value lies in what happens when you get more content shares. Some of the benefits of increased social media sharing include:

• Getting additional traffic to your website
• Increased chances of conversion
• Building up your email list
• Increased brand awareness
• Getting more backlinks, which results in improved SEO ranking

More social media shares also account for increased social proof, and social proof is an important element in digital marketing and in building the reputation of a business—users are more inclined to patronize a product or service when they see a lot of people doing the same.

Tips on How to Boost Social Media Sharing of Your Content

As with anything related to digital marketing, however, prompting and encouraging audiences to share your content can be tricky. Marketers should therefore proactively implement strategies to get people to share your content. Here are some tips on how to boost social media sharing:

1. Make it easy for users to share your content

The first step is the most obvious and most practical thing to do: Set up sharing buttons on your website to make it as easy as possible for visitors to share your content. The goal is to make sharing conveniently done in just one click, which is why positioning and design are important factors to consider.

It has been seen that bright and colorful social sharing buttons are more likely to be clicked. If your content management platform (CMS) does not support social sharing button plug-ins, you can use third-party tools such AddThis and ShareThis.

It’s also important to strategically place social sharing buttons where they are most likely to be clicked. Placing them at the top of your article can work as a form of social proof; placing them at the bottom is agreeable to the natural reader flow, where visitors can conveniently share your content once they’ve finished reading.

2. Create shareable and relatable content

Put simply, people share content that they like and is meaningful to them. In fact, 84% of users expect brands to provide content that “entertains, tells stories, provides solutions, and creates experiences and events.”

When writing blog posts and other text-related content, having an enticing and carefully curated headline is a must.  The most popular headlines today involve listicles, mystery, urgency, or the type that conveys emotions—but steer clear from obvious clickbait, as Facebook, among many other social media platforms, are now penalizing misleading and spammy clickbait content.

Numerous studies have also attested to the power of visual content—to be more evident, around 67% of marketers reported that infographics, charts, and data visualization are the most engaging type of content. Aim to create the right balance between posting text-related content and visual content.

3. Post when your target audience is active

Timing is everything when it comes to social media marketing, and more so if you’re aiming for the most optimal time for engagement. Posting at the times when your target audience is active is among the best strategies to garner more engagement and shares.

While there is no perfect time to post, there are recommended days and times when users are most active in a given platform. Generally speaking, content posted in the middle of the week (for example, Tuesdays to Thursdays) at the middle of the day (for example, noon to three in the afternoon) tend to garner the most engagement.

Of course, a crucial consideration is your target audience. Find out when they are most likely to be online and are most available to engage with on the internet. Experiment posting schedules and see which days and times work best for your content’s performance in terms of comments, shares, and likes.

4. Leverage social media influencers

The best way to have your content shared is to ask people of great influence to your target audience to become ambassadors of your brand, and this includes social media influencers.

Partnering with social media influencers—or those who are mini celebrities in a particular niche with their own following—have been seen as an effective marketing tool to boost social proof and expand advertising reach. Getting the right influencers to amplify your brand message by sharing your content can help in attracting their own followers to not only share your content too, but also to become advocates of your product or services.

In Conclusion

For all of the tips above to work, the most essential thing to remember is to put the same amount of effort you do in promoting your content as you do in creating it. This may be obvious, but it’s surprising to know how many businesses seem to undermine or completely miss this step.

If you want to know more about effective content marketing strategies, or if your need help with developing creative and engaging content, Ilfusion can lend you a hand. Just give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email to [email protected].

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