Ways to Increase Your Social Media Shares

Shares on social media are an important part of a brand’s social media strategy these days. They show what content your audience likes the most and can help give you insight into what types of content to use. It can be challenging to get to your audience these though, as they see so much content.

While likes and comments are typically considered the most important metrics, shares are also an important part of tracking your campaigns, even though many critics consider shares to be a vanity metric. Shares are especially important if you are trying to get more community engagement and brand awareness. So, if you are trying to increase the shares you get on your social media posts, these tips can help.

Prioritize shareable content formats

It is common knowledge that the most shareable content formats are visual. People love to share images and videos, so including these in your posts is vital. Whether you are posting tutorials, testimonials, or even little commercials, videos are a highly engaging content format, and they are ideal for engaging your audience. As for images, infographics are one of the most shared pieces of content, because they are easy for someone to digest quickly, and they do not require a lot of reading. Other graphics and photos are also highly shared, from the cute puppy post to the graphic with an inspirational quote; if the image resonates with your viewers in some way, it will get shared.

Change up your caption strategy

Your captions play an important role in your visibility and shareability on social media. You cannot simply drop links into your posts and hope that people will click on them, even if they are links to videos. You need to include some information in the caption about the content you are sharing to show people why they should look at and share your content.

Hashtags are one of the best ways to help you extend your reach on social media, especially on platforms like Instagram and Twitter. Take the time to look into what hashtags work the best for your brand and your posts before you use them, you do not want to be using a hashtag that you think is related to your brand, but instead, it is about something completely different.

Including a call-to-action in your caption can also help get you more shares. Including something as simple as “share this” or “retweet” can help encourage viewers to share the post.

Encourage responses in your content

A great way to help you extend your reach and get you more shares is by posting polls and questions. These are another form of a call-to-action, and they can help you get new people brought into your conversation. These can be something silly and simple like chocolate vs. vanilla or something more complex that is specific to your brand. These kinds of posts do not require a ton of work to put together, and they are a great way for you to engage. You can begin to build a better sense of community with poll posts and gain valuable insights that can help you get more ideas for content.

Utilize trending topics

There is always something new trending nowadays, whether in the form of hashtag campaigns or memes; if you capitalize on what is already trending, you are more likely to get more shares. While some may see “trend jacking” as lazy or low effort, you can use it to help increase your brand awareness and your brand’s personality. By sharing content that is in line with something that is already trending, you can bring more people to your page and ultimately gain some new followers and conversions.

Make each post mobile-friendly

This should go without saying, but its essential to know that the majority of traffic on social media is coming from mobile devices. While the social media apps do the majority of the optimization for you, it is still important to take a couple of extra steps to ensure that your social media posts are fully optimized for mobile users. Make sure that your posts have line breaks and punctuation so that they do not end up being a solid wall of text on phones. Make sure your graphics are legible, can be zoomed in on, and that the image previews are not cutting out important parts of the text. Finally, add captions to your videos so that people whose phones are silenced can watch them without turning on their volume; this is a good practice, in general, to ensure that the hearing impaired can watch the video.

Timing is everything

You want to post your content at the times when your audience is more likely to be online and engaged. There are varying beliefs on what times and days to post things that vary depending on the industry, so it can be difficult to pin down exactly when you should post, but once you determine the best time and days for your audience, try to keep the majority of your posts in that window.

Make social media sharing seamless on your site

Picture this: you are reading an interesting article on a website that you would like to share with your followers. You go looking for the share buttons on the post, but they are not there. If you want to share the post, you need to copy and paste the link into your social media, or worse, type it in manually. Unless this is something you feel passionately about, you may decide it is not worth the effort and just leave the site when you are done reading the article.

You want to avoid this scenario with your audience. It should be easy for someone to share your content on any social network of their choosing when they finish reading your blog posts, and you can easily embed those links on your website. You can also embed tweets into your content that readers can share; this is usually done with impactful quotes or statistics that you think might be the most worthwhile to your audience to share. When in doubt, you can always do both.