One of the best ways to increase engagement with your brand amongst your fans and followers is through social sharing. When you make it easy for others to find and share your content, it opens the door for more discussion about and engagement with your brand through the information you provide. The following are ways you can make social sharing of your content easy so you grow your audience and increase engagement.
One of the best ways to increase engagement with your brand amongst your fans and followers is through social sharing. When you make it easy for others to find and share your content, it opens the door for more discussion about and engagement with your brand through the information you provide. The following are ways you can make social sharing of your content easy so you grow your audience and increase engagement.
1. Add Social Sharing Buttons
The simplest way to encourage social sharing is by adding social sharing buttons to your website. It’s not limited to just your blog post or article content – people buying a product might be happy to share that they may a purchase with their friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or connections on other social networks. Some might be happy to simply share your website’s homepage as well.
The easiest way to implement a variety of social sharing buttons is through the use of sites like Share This (as shown in the screenshot above from Ron Paul’s blog) or AddThis. If you would prefer to skip widgets and plugins by directly coding in the official buttons, you can grab their code on the following pages.
- Twitter Retweet Button
- Facebook Like Button
- Google +1 Button
- LinkedIn Share Button
- Pinterest Pin This Button
2. Create a Social Sharing Call to Action
The next thing you can do to increase social sharing and engagement with your audience is add a social sharing call to action in your content, beyond the social sharing buttons. For example, with the Click to Tweet service, you can enter any text you desire (plus a link) and get a customized link for that message. When someone clicks on that link in your content, they will be taken to their Twitter page with the text you entered filled in and ready to send as a tweet.
Give it a try now – click here to let your Twitter followers know you just discovered a great new tool – Click to Tweet – on SocialToaster’s blog! The nice part is that you don’t have to worry about having to authorize this through Twitter or having it send unauthorized tweets through your account. Even when you click the link, you can still change the message or choose not to send it.
3. Social Sharing on Your Own Profiles
The common rule for social sharing is out of all of the things that you share, only 20% of it should be about you. So if you were to tweet out ten links a day, that still means two of them could be about you! You can see an example in this list of tweets by @SocialToaster.
If you don’t already, take advantage of the 80/20 principle by sharing some of your own content regularly. Also, keep in mind that your audience isn’t always on at the same time every day. It might take a few updates to catch a good portion of your audience thanks to different time zones.
4. Social Sharing Via Email
Social sharing can begin in more places than your website or your social networks. Be sure to take advantage of getting your social content directly into your contact’s inbox by using WiseStamp. WiseStamp allows you to create a socially-powered email signature that pulls in your latest blog posts, tweets, and includes links to your social profiles.
With this kind of email signature, your contacts will know how to find you on social networks and why they should be following you. They may also click the link to your latest piece of content and share it with their audience as well.
5. Social Sharing through Ambassadors
Last, but not least, we’d be remiss not to mention our innovative approach to help companies take social sharing to the inbox. You can enlist the help of others to share your content on social networks. SocialToaster allows you to build ambassadors, called “Toasters” who want to share your content to their networks, increasing the visibility of your content and engagement with your brand.
This means that your content goes beyond visitors who come to your website or view your social profiles. There is nothing more powerful than word of mouth marketing, and your ambassadors become your front line of word of mouth marketers. Learn more about how SocialToaster works to help you reach a wider audience with your content.
What other ways can you think of to increase the social spread of your content to increase engagement with your brand?
