Buffer

How to Increase your Content Sharing by 700%

Written by - 17 Comments
Categories: Content, Content Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

Creating a website and an on-line presence for your brand was an easy decision a decade ago. All you had to do was get a website company to design and develop your website add a  few lines of text for each page and then “set and forget”. The static website was the status quo and content very rarely changed.How to increase your content sharing by 700 percent

Fast forward to today and websites are dynamic and interactive on-line brand portals where you  need to actively optimize for search engines so potential customers will find you with key words and phrases.

You need to respond to comments on the corporate blog and engage with your customers on your other web properties such as Facebook and Twitter.

White papers need to be created and published and eBooks are the norm especially in knowledge industries.

Embedded on-line videos are now considered as a standard feature of a website and a corporate branded YouTube channel  is becoming essential in your content marketing strategy.

So content needs to be added regularly in a variety of  media formats. Brands are becoming publishers.

Content Needs Marketing

The reality is that creating that content is just part of the work of optimizing your on-line assets and by just publishing you have only just started and the real work now has to be done….marketing your content and sharing it should be part of that marketing strategy!

Lee Odden of  the Top Rank Blog has created this diagram that reflects the content marketing trilogy that highlights activities and media that should be an essential part of the mix of optimizing your on-line brand.

Content Marketing Trilogy

The three essential keys to marketing your content is optimizing your on-line properties for discovery through search, social and email. Providing a variety of multi-media content that caters to the viewing and reading preferences for your audience and finally make it easy to share.

How to Make Sharing Easy

I don’t know how many times I go to a website or blog and want to share the content but the website design makes it hard to share. There are no “Tweet”, LinkedIn or Facebook “share” buttons to make it a no brainer for me to share it with my followers, fans and connections.

Some recent research reveals the impact and importance of adding a few buttons to your blog.

Brightedge conducted a detailed social share analysis of 4 million randomly sample tweets and discovered that sites that had adopted the “Tweet” button drove almost 7 times more link mentions(sharing) on average than sites that did not have the button.

How to make sharing your content easy

This one simple feature has the potential to put your content sharing on steroids and accelerate brand discovery.

Top Brands are Ignoring Optimization for Sharing

The research also discovered that nearly half of the top 10,000 websites do not have social sharing plugins.

Top brands are ignoring optimizing for sharing

If this is the case for the top websites and blogs I would suggest  that the smaller companies and organisations participation rate on including sharing buttons would be significantly lower.

When I added a “Tweet” button to my blog the increase in content sharing and traffic was significant and instantaneous.

In a lot of cases uploading a social plugin and including a “Tweet” button on your blog is a 5-10 minute exercise especially if you have a WordPress blog.

Do you have social sharing buttons on your website or blog?

More Reading

Image by Shira Golding


Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
  • http://twitter.com/mqtodd Michael Q Todd

    Why do you not like the sliding buttons Jeff?

  • http://www.contentequalsmoney.com Emma Richardson

    Are you saying that easy sharing methods are mostly contingent on the plug-in and share buttons? Are there any other methods you’d recommend for increasing share power, outside of the available widgets?

  • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

    Thanks for the comment Paul. I like the analogy about the restaurant!

  • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

    Thanks for the comment LaTonya. I have looked for stats in the past to validate sharing buttons. I have personally seen the significant benefit to this blog but 3rd party research is great to have.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=783744465 Lara Solomon

    Thanks for the post, I didn’t realise that so many sites didn’t have sharing buttons.  I think it’s one of those jobs that keeps falling to the bottom of the list even though it is potentially a quick one!

  • Pingback: SEO content marketing roundup, week ending September 7th | SEO Copywriting

  • http://twitter.com/ResponseCoach Karen J. Marchetti

    If I’m reading the chart correctly, it says “social links/plugins” on HOME page.  Not sure how many sites have share-able content on the home page.  But it is surprising they don’t at least have a link to their Facebook page or Twitter page or LI page.

    The text discussion says “nearly half . . . don’t have social SHARING.”  Actually, it’s possible (but I guess unlikely) they might have SHARE icons on internal pages with more share-able content.  On our site, for example, we have link icons to our various social media pages on every page of our site (including the home page), but we only have SHARE icons on internal content pages.

  • Pingback: Making Your Content Shareable

  • http://www.halfabubbleout.com Natasha

    Thanks for the great content, one report or case study I wish I could see is on positioning of the buttons. I know that having them there is the first step but I wonder conversion wise what spots for buttons have the highest conversion?

    • http://jeffbullas.com Jeff Bullas

      Thanks for the comment Natasha. If you want an example of best practice for the types, placement and which social media sharing buttons are the most important, go and visit either Mashable.com or HuffingtonPost.com

  • Pingback: Content sharing 2.0: meer scoringskansen voor redacteuren en uitgevers | Publishr.nl - trends en ontwikkelingen in online uitgeven

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the great content..

  • Anonymous

    Thanks for the great content

  • http://www.socialmediahelp4u.com/ Carol Lawrence

    There are still a lot of companies that think a regular old website is ok. The ability to ignore the impact of social media is declining. This will be the year when smaller businesses begin to catch up and everyone begins to realize you have to have social media buttons attached to your site. Better yet add a blog to increase your SEO. There are some really great sites popping up where you can create a fast simple website linked to all your social media sites. Here’s two of them. I hope it’s ok i’m sharing the links. 
    http://awesomize.me/caroll and http://central.ly/socialmediahelp4u

  • http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-forum-classified-ads/523597-valid-wp-robot-coupon-code-get-91-discount.html WP Robot coupon

    Well I

  • http://twitter.com/DevinHutchings Devin Hutchings

    Yeah. Especially sites that have good content and the only way to share it is through weird buttons like “Buffer”….. This article is great, but I can’t share it on twitter unless i sign up for buffer, I hate buffer. Don’t put limitations on sharing. The easier to share, the more shares. (I did not share this article, but would if there was a twitter share button)

  • http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk/ K.Singh, London

    The design and placement of the buttons are also very important. But its important to know that every website is different so you cannot fully rely on studies. You must try out alternatives on your site and work out what works best. On some sites, floating bar produces better results but on most standard share buttons below the title and end of the post work best.