Five Ways to Get People to Share Your Social Media Content

We’ve written before about how you can get people reading the content you’ve spend time creating for your business blog, but today we thought we’d take a look at how you can get people to share your content via social media. Organic sharing is the lifeblood of content marketing, and you don’t want to just leave things to chance, so how do you encourage people to share your work without seeming pushy? Here are five ways:

Give and Take

Sharing content is a two-way street and people are far more likely to promote your content on their social channels if you’ve done it first. Find content which is relevant to your business (but maybe not your direct competitor) and give them a shoutout on your most active social channels. Most people are grateful for the unsolicited attention and will go out of their way to return the favour.

Ask Politely

A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of asking people to share their work, but there’s nothing wrong with asking politely for a favour. Sticking a call to action along the lines of “If you liked this post, don’t forget to share it using the buttons below” will remind people that if they liked your content, their friends or colleagues night, too. Which leads us to our next point…

Make it Simple

If you want people to share your content, it’s important to make it really easy for them to do so. Add social media buttons to your website so that sharing a blog post is as easy as a click of the mouse. You can usually customise what the message says when it’s auto-shared with buttons, so you could even add an extra call to action within the share, asking others to share it too. This will increase your chance of your post being shared several times over.

Use Images

Whether you’re a pro with a camera, have had professional photography done for your business or rely on stock images from various sources, posts with images perform better than those without. In fact, posts that include pictures on Facebook get 104% more comments, 84% better click through rate, and 54% more likes. Just by inserting images within your posts, you make the content more dynamic and ultimately more shareable.

Give Readers a Taste

Sharing your content, and making it shareable, is about more than posting the title with a link. Social media posts which share a snippet of the blog, as well as the title, are more noticeable, and receive more traffic than those without, and posts which are read by more people are usually shared more, too. If you don’t want to give away too much about your content before people have a chance to read it, catchy titles like “This Blog Post Will Help You to…” will grab people’s attention, but try not to make them too click-baity, or people will ignore them altogether!