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Easy to Share Content
There have been several studies lately that paint a downright depressing picture about how much content gets shared.
The good news is this doesn’t have to be you.
And given how low the bar is for getting shares, the tips I’ve outlined below can give you a serious edge.
Why?
Because so many marketers are so bad at getting their content shared, if you can become even decent at it, you’ll have a huge advantage.
One of the biggest studies of content shares comes from BuzzSumo and Moz.
They found that half of all the content published gets eight shares or less.
Eight!
Guys – you can beat that just with your own social media sharing.
All that would take is:
1 Facebook share
1 LinkedIn share
1 Google+ share
5 tweets
That’s not hard to do.
But it appears a lot of people just aren’t doing it.
In another study of blogging, CoSchedule found that 77% of the bloggers they surveyed share their blog posts three times or less on social media.
In my example list from earlier, the eight shares I counted mostly included sharing content just once on each platform (except for the tweets, of course).
That’s a good start, but you don’t have to stop there.
Re-share your content.
Even a month after it’s been published.
This is especially important to do if the post did well from the start.
Tools like Meet Edgar or Buffer can make re-sharing very easy.
Re-sharing also makes it easy to save time managing your social media accounts.
Don’t worry about boring your audience.
On average barely 5% of your audience sees any of your posts.
So re-sharing them – even multiple times – just means more of your audience will see them for the first time.
If you are still on the fence about this approach, read our article on How You Can Reuse Your Content in 7 Ways to learn some best practices!
It’s wild how few people do this.
According to a survey by Scoop.It, only about 30% of marketers send their content via email frequently enough to make it matter.
Even though email marketing consistently outperforms social media.
So send a newsletter with links to your latest, greatest content!
Say you wrote a lengthy blog post, created a hilarious meme, and are launching a new contest in the same week – all of that is content worth sharing.
Write up an email and send it along so your subscribers so they are in-the-know.
As long as the content is worthwhile (I’m sure it is, right?) your loyal following will be happy to hear about it.
Bonus: Add social sharing buttons and pre-formatted retweets to your emails, too. Just like you would with blog posts or other content on your site.
If you want people to share your content, you have to make it easy for them to share.
Otherwise, they won’t do anything.
So if you’re one of the few blogs that don’t already have social sharing buttons setup, go tie that down.
There are a ton of WordPress plugins and other tools and apps that let you set up social sharing buttons.
Social Warfare is a great choice.
So are Shareaholic, AddThis, and SumoMe’s social sharing app.
Once you’ve got those buttons set up, make sure they show the share counts to your site visitors.
Setting them up to show those counts will demonstrate to your visitors that other people liked your content enough to share it.
Of course, we still don’t have our Twitter share counts back. (Grrrr…)
But there are ways around that.
A tweet this CTA is another spin on “make your content easy to share.”
This time it’s for pre-formatted tweets.
There’s a bunch of free plugins that let you do this easily.
My favorite is Click To Tweet.
Here’s what one looks like on the Convince and Convert blog:
You know that content with images gets like twice the shares and re-shares, right?
If there’s no nice header image, people know they’re less likely to get their post re-shared.
There’s a simple solution: Add a nice header image for everything you publish.
Ends up, this has some SEO benefits, too.
A basic “infographic” type graphic is great for visual sharing sites like Pinterest or Instagram
The more you can distill a post or other content into a simple visual, the more it will get shares.
Especially if you make it as useful as possible.
Take note: I’m not saying you need a full-blown infographic.
Those can be time-consuming and expensive to create.
Just a simple graphic will do.
Like this:
Not sure how to make even a simple image?
Check out Canva.
It’s designed for nondesigners.
A lot of sites do this because they don’t want to manage comments.
If you’ve made that decision, please reconsider.
Comments are valuable – you want people to be leaving their feedback.
When people leave a comment they also tend to share the content they commented on.
And you get some nice SEO benefits.
Worried about spam comments?
I hear you – some sites get over a hundred of them a day.
But stop fretting and just install Disqus.
It’s a free WordPress plugin that will tame the tidal wave of spam comments.
Ask yourself: If you came across the content on your site, and you had no affiliation with it, would you share it?
If the answer is no, then you need to be publishing better stuff.
There’s advertising, of course.
That’s one way to get your content out there.
Consider Markethive, it is a social network of entrepreneurs who can subscribe their social accounts to your Markethive blog. Boom, massive sharing on steroids
Content sharing takeaway
Far too many bloggers and marketers are giving their content promotion short shrift.
And it’s costing them – twice.
First, all that work to create their content is lost, because so few people see it.
Then all those readers – and customers – they could have gotten by sharing their content aren’t ever reached.
So that business is lost.
The solution?
Try to spend at least as much time promoting your content as you did creating it.
Even if it means you have to publish a bit less often.
Now consider Markethive’s blogs subscribe
Markethive’s Blog platform Wordpress plugin makes your Wordpress a huge social share hub.
Markethive turns your content and marketing into a huge broadcasting system integrated with a large social network making social share turn key, simple and impressive.
Thomas Prendergast
CEO Founder
