How to get people to share your posts on Social Media

More Social media shares mean more traffic and as such I want to share with you how to get people to share your posts on Social media. In this article I will show you what you may not be doing right if you haven’t been getting good Social media shares.

Do you want to improve your Social media shares? Do you want more traffic from Social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+? This article will encourage your site visitors to share your articles on the various Social media sites they belong to.

Social media plays a huge role in content marketing and a very important key distribution vehicle for contents. Social media shares allows for good contents to spread and reach a wider audience. But the question is what makes people share a post on Social media?

If we can understand what make people to share contents on Social media, then we can be able to recreate such every time we publish a piece of content and generally improve our social media share.

1. Useful Contents: People will most likely share contents they find very useful. A study by the NYTimes shows that a larger percentage (94%) of people share contents they find valuable and entertaining, considering how the information they share will be useful to others.

They say what you read and of course share defines you. If so, a good percentage (68%) of people share contents to define themselves to others, to give others a better sense of who they are and what they care about.

Over 78% of others share great contents they find online because it enables them to stay connected to people they may not otherwise stay in touch with. Others (69%) for self-fulfillment, because it allows them to feel more involved in the world.

The last type of people (84%) that share contents they find useful online do so because it is a good way to support causes or issues they care about.

Considering the different types of people above and why they share contents the find online, one thing stands out – usefulness of the content. If you want to get more people to share your posts on Social media, then try and publish only useful contents, contents that can solve people’s problems, contents that can add value to the reader and prompt him to share to his friends and family on the Social media.

2. Images: Study has shown that more people engage on visual contents than textual. People will most likely share contents with images they find interesting or amusing. So if you want to get people to share your posts on Social media, add images to your article.

Adding at least one image on your blog post will increase your Social media shares. The wider or taller the image the better chances of people sharing it on Social media.

3. Social Share Buttons: When people can’t find where to share a post from how will they do so? If you want to get more people to share your posts on Social media then make it easy for them to. Add an easy-to-notice Social share button to your website/blog.

You can add it on the left sidebar or on top and below the post body. As you can see I have a floating social button on the top of my content and another below the post. Make it easy for people to find and use the Social share buttons and you will improve your social media shares.

4. Properly optimize your post for Social media share: Adding a Social share button is not quite enough, you also have to make your post look great when shared. You have to properly optimize your blog post to make it look great when shared.

Ensure to add Open Graph Protocol to your blog, this enables your web pages to become a rich object in a social graph. This gives you control over how your shared posts look on Facebook when shared. The Open Graph Protocol will set the title, post description, display image and site when your content is shared on Facebook.

Simply install and activate the Open Graph Protocol Framework if you are a self-hosted WordPress user and it will automatically render the required metadata for posts and pages.

You can also enable Twitter cards for your website. Twitter card will enhance the way you posts will look when shared on Twitter. Twitter cards will reveal Find out how I activated Twitter Cards for Netmediablog.

5. Call to Action: Another way to get people to share your posts on Social media is by asking them to. People will easily read an article no matter how useful they find it without feeling compelled to share it. So simply asking your visitors to share the post can compel them to do so and thus improve your social media shares.

What have you done to improve your Social media share?

Growing the number of social media shares is not something that just happen, you must make it possible and easy for your posts to be shared. While you may be responsible for the contents your produce and how they appear when shared, the factors discussed here can really encourage people to share your posts.

What have you found that increases your social shares? Let us know in the comments below…and if you like this post, please share!