Is Nobody Sharing Your Content? Find a Quick Fix

With social signals playing a bigger part in SEO than ever before, getting more links to your content via Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is important.

So how do you make your blog posts more shareable? Keep reading to discover five simple steps.

Step 1: Spend More Time on Your Headline

I’ve read dozens of blog posts every week for years and some of the best posts I’ve read have had pretty poor headlines.

Whenever you sit down to write an article, think about how you can make the title stand out on someone’s Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn stream. In many cases you literally have a split second to grab someone’s attention and make them want to read your article. You have to hook people before you think about getting them to share your content.

Step 2: Add Prominent Sharing Buttons

While many people will share your content with a retweet for example, there will be others who will read an article on your site and want to share instantly. For this reason it’s essential to have logos displayed for the main social media networks such as Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook so they are clearly visible to the reader.

Lots of people either don’t have these icons at all, or if they do, make them as small as possible so it’s unlikely anyone will even notice them.

Step 3: Get Your Timing Right

There are tools such as www.whentotweet.com (paid service) that analyse your Twitter followers to see when they’re most active. This information is then compiled to give you a recommended best time to tweet. You can then make sure you post all links to your new content at this time to see if it delivers more interaction and retweets.

In my experience timing is very important. If you post a new blog article first thing on a Monday or late afternoon on a Friday, the chances are most people will be too busy with other things to even take notice.

Step 4: Share People’s Comments

A tactic I’ve seen used to good effect on Twitter is the sharing of people’s blog comments. For example, if someone posts a reply, you should retweet your article asking for other people’s opinions too.

By doing this you can not only get a good discussion going on your blog, you can also get people to notice your original article and retweet it if they didn’t do it first time around.

Step 5: Ask People to Share

There’s nothing wrong with asking people to share an article if they liked it. You could do this at the end of the article itself and when you post it on social media sites.

To some people this may seem a little pushy, but providing you’re polite, you‘ll generally find people will respond more favourably if you just ask them to share.

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