Promotable Content Optimizing for Social Media

Optimizing for Social

If you want your content to do well on social media, you will need to not only promote it yourself, but encourage your readers to promote it too. The following are some great ways to make sure your blog post gets promoted on the top social networks.

Add Social Sharing Buttons

The easiest way to encourage social sharing is add social sharing buttons to your blog posts. This will remind people to share your post if they enjoyed it, and show them which networks you would like them to share it upon.

The most common social networks to include in your lineup are Twitter, Facebook, Google +1, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. If you don't want to manually add in the social sharing button code, you can use extensions and plugins to add them quickly. Some extensions and plugins that work with different blog platforms include AddThis, ShareThis, Shareaholic, Digg Digg(WordPress only - most popular), and Sociable (WordPress only).

One key thing to do with any social plugin is check to see if you can add your username to the Twitter retweet button. This way, when people share your posts on Twitter, it will have via @yourusername on all of the tweets.

Implement Social Meta Data

In order to further optimize your content for social media sharing, you can add additional code to your website to tell social media networks what title, description, and image you want used when the post is shared.

To implement this functionality for Twitter, refer to the developer's information about Twitter Cards. For Facebook, you can try WordPress plugins for Facebook Open Graph.

Include a Great Image

Adding a great image to every blog post is key to getting people to share it on Pinterest. But it also helps social shares of your post stand out on other networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and any social site that includes thumbnails with links.

If you plan on using Facebook advertising to promote your blog post, be sure that at least one of the images in your post has less than 20% text on it or that you select a new image when creating your post / ad, otherwise it will not be approved by the Facebook ads team. If you need ideas on where to get images for your content, revisit the email from day 5 on formatting your content.

Write Tweetable Snippets

Sometimes, people are more interested in tweeting statistics and quotes over blog post titles. Hence, if you include tweetable bites in your blog posts, you can increase the likelihood of your post getting shared on Twitter.

How it works? Write the tweetable phrase, then use ClicktoTweet and create a tweet that includes the phrase plus a shortened link to your post. Then create a link in your post next to the phrase that reads tweet this or similar.

If you have scrolled to the end of these emails, you've seen ClicktoTweet in action in the Ps. line, along with the following tip.

Have a Social Call to Action

Last, but not least, let readers know that you want them to share your posts by adding a call to action at the end such as "If you've enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends." Or get specific by saying "If you know people who are struggling with [insert topic here], share this with them on [insert social network here]."

If you don't want to type in a specific call to action with each post, just include it near the social sharing buttons at the end of your post within your blog template, that way each post ends with a consistent social sharing call to action.