So you’ve toiled for hours crafting and creating your blog, pouring your expertise, insight and passion into every paragraph. But how can you ensure as many people read it as possible and that it’s shared widely?
Provide social sharing links on each post
Most blogging platforms provide the ability for users to click on a link and share your blog on the social media platform of their choosing.
Two of the main blogging platforms, wordpress.com and Google’s blogger (via POWr widget) provide social sharing icons. If your blog is hosted on your website it’s worth checking whether this is facility is available.
Most modern web content management systems will have this built in, but if yours doesn’t you can always use a third party tool such as Share Link Generator to make this available for your readers.
Customise the links for each network and post
Having the facility for social sharing is only half the task and I’m often amazed when trying to share blog posts to twitter, for example, the automatically created tweet is way over twitter’s 140 character limit.
For each blog post ensure that you have checked what clicking the social sharing icons actually results in. For sharing on twitter, have you included your username e..g @socialbuk and any relevant hashtags? What about the link and tracking it through a link shortener such as bit.ly?
Decide on your distribution strategy
Enabling your readers to share your blog posts is crucial, but, even more, important is how are people made aware of your blog post so they read it in the first instance?
There are a large number of tools, apps and plugins which can automatically post details of your blog to social networks. Does that mean it’s job done?
Well not exactly. What about crafting each tweet, post and update with your intended audience on each platform in mind?
Don’t forget the visuals
Grab your audience’s attention by creating a great image to promote your blog post on social networks Tools such as PicMonkey and Canva will help you create stunning graphics without the need for a design department to support you.
Images still get great results. Content with relevant images gets significantly more views than content without relevant images. I’d love to put a % figure on this, but there’s a lot of research out there over the past four years with varying figures for views and engagement. Let’s just say that in the current age of social video and live streaming, images still work well.
So that’s our four quick tips on how to make your blogs more shareable – head over to Twitter to join in the discussion.