Social media is an absolutely fantastic tool to get traffic to your website and raise awareness for your business.
If you do it right you be able to get lots of benefits from it without too much of an investment on your part.
Here are 7 tips to get more shares of your content. More shares means more people see your posts and your website gets more traffic.
1) Create Content that Provides Value for Your Audience
This is always the most important thing with social media. You need to provide value for your audience and give them a reason to follow you.
Posting only sales or promotional related content is a big mistake that many people still make.
Remember that you?re not just competing with other brands for space in your followers?s newsfeeds. You?re also competing with their friends and family as well.
If you don?t provide value for your audience there?s no reason for them to follow you.
2) Share Your Content at the Best Time
Figure out the best time when your followers are most active and share your content then.
It doesn?t make much sense to post something at 3:00 am when your audience is asleep for example.
The different social networks all have different best times.
In general we?ve found that the best time to share on networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is in the morning.
Right after people arrive at work they check their email and social networks.
The best time to post on Instagram we?ve found is in the evening.
You need to test this yourself however because every audience is different.
For example Hootsuite says the best times to post are:
- Facebook between 12:00pm and 3:00pm weekdays
- Instagram between 12:00pm and 1:00pm weekdays
- Twitter at 3:00pm on weekdays
Coschedule on the other hand has found that their best times to post are:
- Facebook between 1:00pm to 4:00pm late in the week and on weekends
- Instagram between 8:00am to 9:00am, 5:00pm or 2:00am
- Twitter between 12:00pm to 3:00 pm or 5:00pm on weekdays
You can start testing using these times as a guide and figure out the best times for your audience from there.
3) Add Social Sharing Icons to Your Website
You need to make it as easy as possible for people to share the content on your website. Especially if you have any sort of blog.
People are way more likely to click on a sharing button at the end of a post than they are to open up Facebook in a new tab to copy and paste a link to your post.
Fortunately there are lots of excellent tools to add sharing buttons to your site. Many of them are free as well.
Off the top of our head we recommend you check out:
If you use WordPress there are lots of plugins you can use as well.
4) Use Calls to Action in Your Post
Calls to Action are always an excellent way to guide people to doing what you want them to do next.
It?s completely acceptable to ask people politely to share your posts on social media sites.
Some examples of phrases you can use are:
- Twitter: ?Retweet if??
- Facebook or Instagram: ?Tag a friend who??
- Facebook: ?Like and share if??
- Instagram: ?Double tap if??
5) Curate and Share Valuable Content from Others
Social media is all about providing value to your audience but you don?t have to come up with everything yourself.
If you see a post on another site that people in your audience would find helpful by all means, share it on your social networks.
Even if someone else?s post gets a ton of likes and shares your account is still getting visibility.
More importantly you?re helping your audience and giving them a good reason to follow you for more content in the future.
6) Use Beautiful Imagery
Images make a huge difference on social media. By adding big attractive images to your posts you?ll definitely get more clicks and shares.
There are a ton of great websites where you can get absolutely fantastic photos that are completely free to use however you want.
We compiled a giant list of them that you can check out in this post:
59 Fantastic Websites to Get Free Stock Photos for Your Marketing in 2017
7) Share Your Content More than Once
This is an easy trick that can easily double your social media traffic.
Usually only a small percentage of your audience will see your posts. There are many reasons for this.
Social networks restrict your views so they can get you to pay to promote your posts.
More simply however your entire audience is never online at the same time. It?s very easy for people to miss posts that get buried in their news feeds. Especially on very fast moving networks like Twitter.
For every important post you make take a few minutes to put together a schedule.
Your posts will go out:
- On publish (the first time)
- The same day, hours later
- The next day
- Next week
- Next month
You don?t want to post too much too often.
On a network like Twitter it might be fine to post twice a day, then twice the next day since it moves so fast.
On a network like Facebook however it might be best to make your initial post and then wait a week before reposting it.
It?s very important that you change up your message when you do a re-post. Don?t share the exact same message multiple times.
This is your chance to also optimize the message for each network. Facebook and Google+ both give you a lot more room to add a message with your post than Twitter does for example.
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