Look on almost any blog or website and you’re certain to see plenty of links to Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms, with widgets galore inviting people to share content, tweet about posts or tell their Facebook friends about what it is they’re reading. The problem is, how many of those buttons and widgets actually get clicked?
One of the best forms of advertising is the type that’s carried out on your behalf by people who are interested in what you have to say and recommend you, or talk about you, to their friends, family and colleagues. Personal recommendations in any form are worth their weight in gold, and social media buttons provide a great way of achieving this. But if they’re not being used enough, what can you do about it?
Don’t overdo it!
One of the commonly used approaches is to smother the screen with social media sharing icons and buttons, with regular links, pushes, hints, nudges, popups and other fancy methods that only just fall short of actually crawling through the screen, grabbing their mouse and doing the clicking for them. However, this has never really had much effect. In fact all those fancy gadgets and buttons can often detract from the content.
This is where it really counts. It’s the content that matters. No matter how many social widgets you plaster over the screen, if the content doesn’t grab the reader enough to make them want to share it themselves then it won’t make much difference.
Sometimes you might have read an article and wanted to share it, and there haven’t been any obvious sharing buttons, so you may have simply copied the URL, shortened it, and then tweeted it to your followers. If the content is good enough people will want to share it anyway. Making it easier is great, but ultimately it’s the content that has to grab the reader.
Want shares? Create something WORTH sharing!
When writing content you want people to share try to always provide something of value. Answer a commonly aske questions, perhaps in a way that’s a little different. Offer an opinion that’s unusual, say something thought provoking. In other words, be original, and provide value.
If your content is original, and offers something of value, then people will naturally tend to want to share it, and this is where the real power of online marketing starts to work in your favour.
[Tweet “If you want to see your content shared on social media, create content WORTH sharing!”]
