5 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Social Media Sharing

Are readers sharing your content? Assuming you have content that’s worth sharing, you could be lacking the right social optimization and sharing tools necessary to make it simple and easy for readers to spread the word about your content.

And while SEO and paid advertising will always be around, there’s nothing more powerful than word-of-mouth via the reader’s’ social channels.

Give your website the boost your content deserves and use these tactics to optimize your site for better social sharing.

Here are 5 Ways to Optimize Your Site for Social Media Sharing:

1. Article titles should be attractive. It’s important to make the article titles and headlines of the content you share in social media really stand out and pull people into your content. Boring titles be gone! Be sure the headlines you use are eye-catching, interesting, and clearly indicate what the content will be about.

2. Article should be in brief. Certain social media sites — like Twitter — limit the number of characters that can be used in a post or update. When people share an article, they often like to include some of their own commentary with it. Keep in mind that the post will also need to leave room for a shortened URL to the content itself. Don’t take up that precious social media real estate with a long title. Keep it brief so your sharers can add some of their own insight, too.

3. Add enticing meta descriptions. When you share a post on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, they automatically pull in a description of the post. Most sites generate this description from the URL’s meta description. While meta descriptions no longer mean very much for search engine optimization, they are very helpful for social media optimization. Be sure each blog post, web page, and landing page you create includes an enticing meta description to motivate social media users to check out your content.

4. Add an attention-grabbing image. Similarly, when posting content to social media sites, most sites will also pull in an image to show. Make sure your social media shares are more visually pleasing by making it a habit to add photos and images to all your content.

5. Make sure your content is high in quality. At the very least, the content you’re hoping will spread in social media needs to be good. You can try every one of the tricks we just mentioned, but if your content is no good at its very core, none of it is going to matter. Focus most of your energy on creating high quality content, and usually, the shares will follow.

Tags: content marketing, social sharing