With over a billion active websites and blogs on the internet, today, any extra traffic, optimization, or social media shares coming our way is always good. Even with a billion active sites online creating content, there are more than three billion users spread across all of the major social networking platforms.
This means the top social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram should all be a major part of your content creation and marketing plans. With so much free traffic and social sharing up for grabs on these platforms, any blog owner could easily see thousands of clicks daily from each platform to their site.
However, expert companies specializing in content creation, such as Compose.ly, believe just having a blog and putting content out there is never enough. If you want to compete with the best sites out there and get real shares and clicks, you need to have real content and make it easy for your audience to find.
With all of this in mind, let’s cover some of the best ways to make your blog more social friendly!
Run Your Blog with WordPress CMS
WordPress is the free content management solution that makes site-building and content creation easy. WordPress is now the most popular CMS in the world today and powers hundreds of millions of sites online.
As great as WordPress is for creating sites and content, it’s also amazing for social media and SEO as well. This is why we just had to list it as number one in our top five tips for how to best take advantage of social media.
In short, WP allows site owners to easily create new site designs and customizations (through WP Themes) and for the addition of social sharing tools (using WP Plugins) to increase engagement and shareability across many different platforms. This means, when it comes to social media optimization and adding social sharing buttons, there is no need for site owners to ever need to know how to design or code.
Use Click to Share Social Sharing Buttons
How many times have you been to a website or blog and came across an article or resource that was really good, and you wanted to share it with others? It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, you would like for it to be easy enough to share with different audiences. More often than not, this is done with easy to find social sharing buttons found at the top or bottom of the blog post.
Even more annoying than not being able to find such social sharing buttons on your site, is finding out that the site doesn’t have any social sharing buttons at all!
As a site owner, everyone should already have social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of their content, if not a floating social sidebar. This is simply one of the best ways to increase social sharing on your site. We recommend using a plugin like Sassy Social, Social Warfare, or Easy Social Share Plugin. You can also see a wide range of other plugins available in this resource guide from Hubspot. The main difference between each of these is how they might look or the features that come with each.
All you need to know is that you want to have big and easy to see social sharing buttons on your site. Without them, it’s just another reason for visitors to read and leave your site without sharing or bookmarking it for later.
Schedule Out Your Best Content on Top Social Platforms
Finding success with social media marketing isn’t just about having great content and adding social sharing buttons to your site. With so much content and competition already out there, site owners and marketers will need to do a lot on their end as well.
For example, if you aren’t already promoting your own content and sharing it across all of the major social sharing platforms, you are already doing it wrong. This, in itself, is one of the best ways to attract new audiences and gain new social followers.
Secondly, social networking scheduling tools are your friends for continued social promotion and time-saving efforts. Take the time to schedule out your content for weeks or months in advance, while also having some of your best content continually shared over time.
Some of the most popular tools for easily accomplishing this are HootSuite and MeetEdgar. And when doing any type of scheduling or posting, don’t forget to take advantage of the latest trends or hashtags that might be getting attention.
As with all social sharing, always be sure to create your own eye-catching headlines and use the right image size when creating thumbnails for each social platform.
Shorter URL and Redirect Share Better
When sharing anything on social media, you want to make sure it displays as professionally and clean as possible. For site owners, it’s best to have your actual site domain as the post and share URL. If not, users might not like the way the URL looks and may prefer not to click it.
With so many different phishing and scam offers on the internet today, everyone is always going to be cautious about what they are going to click. The same is true for what each social platform will automatically post or trigger as potential spam.
Keeping all of this in mind, be sure to use shorter URLs with only a few words in your permalink URL (when using WordPress). Not only will this help with social sharing, but it can also help with SEO as well.
If you are going to use a redirect, but sure to use one that is trusted or one that you have created to match the same brand as your site. Some social scheduling and sharing platforms will automatically use a redirect URL so they can track your clicks. These are often fine as well.
Write Catchy and Engaging Headlines for Social Media
The title or headline of your content is always going to matter most. After this, it’s going to be the visual or thumbnail that you associate with your content as well. We touched on this earlier, but it’s so important that we had to give it a section of its own.
We also mentioned how every social platform has its own requirements in terms of image size and character limit. For example, A shared image on Facebook is 1,200 x 630, while Twitter wants a minimum of 440×220 for any in-stream content images. Instagram sizes are 161×161 for thumbnails and 1080×1080 for the full photo size.
If you were to upload the same thumbnail or photo size to each platform, it might look good on one, but it will look unprofessional and cut off on others. This is the last thing you want.
And in reference to titles and headlines, it’s best to come up with new titles on each platform. This way, you can split-test which ones perform best, or write longer/shorter headlines based on the requirements of each platform.
If you aren’t experienced in coming up with original titles or eye-catching headlines, here is a list of 74 creative titles that you can plug and play different words in to match your article.
Social Media + Blogging = A Winning Combination
No matter what you are currently doing with your content creation and social media marketing efforts, it’s important that you are doing something. Even just one new social share from your side a day on each social platform can result in hundreds of new social shares in total per month.
Be sure to read through each of the recommended tips and suggestions listed above, and see where your marketing strategy might need some improvement. Also, be sure to take advantage of the many different tools, plugins, and expert advice than can improve your social media marketing across the board.