How to Get More People To Share Your Content

Getting people to share your social media content can often become a cumbersome task. In fact, even Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola devote a significant portion of their marketing budget to creating engagement strategies on Facebook. Mastering Facebook can be a big step for your company.

Although social media marketing can often be a perplexing concept just keep in mind that the fundamental goal will always be engagement. The more Facebook fans and users that engage in your company content the larger your social media marketing return will be.

Being Strategic About Social Plugins

In the current internet environment having social media share icons are imperative to your website’s marketability. According to a study performed by BrightEdge over 10% of the internet’s top 10,000 websites have a Facebook like button on their home page. However, you can’t just smack some buttons on the page and call it a day. Instead consider how you can leverage different avenues that are available for sharing content. For example, placing a Facebook comments box on your website can increase the likelihood that viewers will comment on your content. Additionally, in the event users do comment the social plug-in enables the comment itself to be published within the Facebook platform. You should also place sharing options above and below content to increase visibility and access. If you’re company blog runs on WordPress you can also implement auto-detection plug-ins that prompt users to share or subscribe to your content depending on the platforms they are logged into when they are viewing your content.

Time Sensitive Content Sharing

Your social media posts or tweets can actually benefit from time-sensitive posting. In a study conducted by Buddy Media “brands that posted outside business hours had 20% higher engagement rates.” Take a look at the results of the study below.

Granted, not every brand will have the same peak engagement periods. However, you can implement A/B testing in your social media efforts to determine exactly when your fans or followers are most responsive. Doing so will enable you to develop a consensus on the demands of your target audience within the Facebook platform.

Measuring the Effective of Shared Content

Another important consideration is the type of content you share and how you share it. For example, posting a blog update on Facebook can go one of two ways. It’s either blah and falls flat or a truly genuine opportunity for your fans to participate. Our attitudes towards what we share are not simply expressed internally. To say just being excited about sharing content is not enough. You must both be both genuinely excited and express that excitement in your content. When updating your fan page status, posting a link that reads “Blog Update” is blah and highly ineffective. Instead, invoke action with specificity and provoke interest by using social ad copy. For example, you’ve written an article on Lead Generation Strategies. To post this article link you will update your status and say something about the link itself. Your status now reads, “More leads equals more sales. A critical review on 2011’s most successful lead generation strategies. Visit us today and watch powerful ideas at work.” Now that’s much better than “Blog Update”. The point here is you want to entice your viewers and at the same tell them what action you want them to take.

Engagement Incentives

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube alike share viral exposure characteristics that essentially multiply the effectiveness of inbound marketing. One person shares with another and another and so on. In order to leverage viral exposure you must build as much momentum as possible during a specified period or campaign. There is no better method to accomplishing this than providing an incentive to act. Therefore, integrating contests, sweepstakes, prizes, free gifts, feature slots, or anything you can think of to motivate viewers increases your engagement efforts and graduates your business to a virally exposed level.

Final Considerations

Social Media at its onset appeared to be an after-hours college escape portal and nothing more. Today it fosters global connectivity and has definitely developed a stronghold in online marketing. The successfulness of strategies will differ across industries and businesses alike. Therefore, it’s important to implement and analyze strategies that are most effective for your business.

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If improving your local Social Media Marketing is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.