Optimising Your Content for Social Media Sharing

Social media is a valuable medium for promoting content material. While it’s essential to direct content to your network of Twitter followers and connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Google+, the real value of social networking is its capability to send content away from your direct network. It stands to reason that by making it possible for others to share your articles with their personal networks, you are considerably extending the reach of your content.

What exactly can you do to move this procedure along? Even though you can’t directly influence anyone to talk about your content, there are various steps you can take to indirectly encourage them.

How to make your content more share friendly for Social Media

1. Magnetise your own article/blog titles.

By ‘magnetise’ I mean you need to make the post titles and headlines really stand out to pull people in. Articles with boring titles end up disappearing. Ensure the headlines you utilise are eye-catching and useful, and that they clearly indicate what the content is about.

2. Keep the article titles short.

Certain social sites – such as Twitter – limit the amount of characters you can use in a post or update. When people share articles they often prefer to include some of their own commentary too. Don’t take up precious social networking real estate by having a long title. Keep it as brief as possible so that your sharers can add their own personal insight as well.

3. Include enticing Meta explanations.

When you submit a post to social sites like MySpace, LinkedIn, and even Google+, they automatically pull a description of the actual post. Most sites produce this description in the URL’s Meta explanation. Though Meta descriptions don’t mean very much for SEO anymore, they are very useful for social media optimisation. Ensure each article, website page and landing page you create consists of an enticing Meta explanation to motivate social network users to look at your content.

4. Add an attention-grabbing picture.

When posting content to social networking sites, most sites will pull in a picture to display. Ensure that your social networking posts are much more visually pleasing by making it a habit to include photos and images to any or all your content.

5. Include hash tags or even Twitter usernames within titles (whenever appropriate).

Occasionally you may want to give your content some extra presence or importance – maybe it’s an essential news announcement or you might be talking about a person or event? Where appropriate, consider including the hash tag or the individual @username directly inside the title. When people share your content, it will automatically appear in the hash tag’s flow or the @username, which will provide it added presence and encourage much more sharing.

6. Add social sharing buttons.

According to a current study from BrightEdge Systems, websites that include social sharing options generate 7x more mentions than the ones that don’t. Adding social sharing buttons for websites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Google+ is a terrific way to encourage your website visitors to share your posts in the social media world. Add these buttons to every landing page, website article, blog post and any other content you produce.

7. Make sure your content is high quality and original

This is the only way it will be distributed and go viral in social media. You can implement each of the tricks I mentioned but if your content is poor at its very core, nothing can save it. If anything, focus most of your energy on creating top quality content and the social shares will follow naturally.