In order to increase the amount of social shares, a business owner must make sure that they do three things for their business:
- Provide a legitimate solution to a problem.
- Become consistently active on social media websites
- Make the content or services on your website “shareable”.
Here is a step by step mini guide on how you can get more social shares for your website.
Become an Expert about a Specific Problem and Blog It
One of the most important things that you can do is to find out the deepest problems that are causing pain to the people you want to market towards. Here are some ways that you can find out the biggest problems:
- Visit message boards of where your customers tend to visit, and find out what their biggest pains are by reading posts or texting out a thread of the biggest pains in an industry. The goal should always be to give and learn, not to take.
- Send out newsletters to your mailing list.
- Validate a problem by creating a landing page that advertises an eBook. If you get a lot of sign-ups, you’ll know that there is plenty of content that needs to be made in this regard.
Once you find out what the biggest problems are, anything that is produced in regards to solving it will naturally be shared. Especially if you are using high quality means to create content such as:
- Podcasts
- How-To articles with descriptive pictures
- Entertaining videos
- Creative blog posts infused with a unique personality
Make It Easy to Share Your Expertise
Sharing your content takes work on your reader’s part, and they are willing to do this work if the content offers great value. However, here’s the thing – people aren’t going above and beyond to make sure your content gets exposure. Therefore, it’s critical that you make your content extremely shareable. Here are some ways that you can do this.
Blog Through WordPress –
Use WordPress when blogging. To be honest, there are many platforms out there, but WordPress seems to be gaining a larger share of the blogosphere every single day – leaving everybody else in the dust, and it’s because of its ability to integrate plugins seamlessly. Plugins are programs that make content management easier – and there are plugins that make your content easier to share.
Sociable –
This WordPress plugin is probably one of the most popular ones on the internet. It continues to grow at an exponential rate and has nearly 2 million downloads already. One of the benefits of this plugin is that it allows for the ratings and reviews of individual blog posts. The plugin also allows you to pick your own icon design styles, allow social sharing to be displayed as a social skyscraper on the side of the plugin, or if you simply want it as a default horizontal bar that appears at the beginning or end of each post. It even includes a Like button so that the user doesn’t have to go above and beyond to share your content with others. Here is the Sociable WordPress plugin.
Social Shares Button –
This type of plugin makes it easy for users to share your content. Furthermore, it displays how many times the content has been shared – this creates a feeling of social proofing. Users can share this content using Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit. Now, here’s the warning that must be offered, if your just a new blogger who is getting started and not getting a good deal of traffic – it may be recommended to use a different social sharing button to start off, because having 0 shares could be damaging to your reputation – that is a form of negative social proofing. Here is Social Share Button’s WordPress plugin. Here are two more you should look into: AddThis and ShareThis. BTW, Planet Marketing uses the AddThis plugin.
By using these techniques, you can increase the amount of social shares and ultimately increase sales!