Your company's blog is a great way to keep your target audience informed about news and events, which helps to build stronger customer relationships. It also helps to position your brand as an industry leader, allowing you to generate more leads, sales, and revenue.
Making sure that your blog content is easy to share helps to improve visitor interaction as well as the overall success of the blog. Here are four tips to help turn your blog into a social sharing machine.
1. Publish Great Content
You might be thinking, "Well of course the content needs to be great," but you would be surprised at how many companies simply publish boring corporate financial information or press releases on their blog. Content that the average visitor interprets as corporate gibberish and has very little interest in isn't going to receive any interaction and it surely won't receive any social sharing love.
Your blog readers are real people, so speak to them in a way that they can relate to you. If your message (and tone) connects with the reader they are much more likely to interact with your content and share it across their favorite social media platforms.
A great example of "non-corporate" content is Whole Foods Whole Story blog, which provides content their target audience enjoys. While reading the blog their visitors can also find store locations, sign up for the Whole Foods newsletter, and even print coupons.
2. Simple Effective Social Sharing Buttons
If you already have a blog then you probably already have some sort of social sharing buttons in place. They are obviously the best way to encourage your readers to share your content, but are you using the right buttons and are they in the right position?
Social sharing buttons that are not visually appealing or not in the right location will be skipped over. They need to match the look and feel of your website, and they need to be easily accessible. Take a look at the social sharing button that appears at the top of each blog post that my company, Market Domination Media, publishes:
It is a flat design that matches the look and feel of our website and it is very simple. There are some social sharing buttons that give the reader several dozen choices in regards to what social platforms they can share the content on. We made it very simple: they can immediately share the content on Facebook or Twitter, and by clicking the plus icon it allows them to also share on LinkedIn and Google+. Stick to the social channels that your readers are more likely to use.
3. Use Facebook Commenting
Company blogs are not typically a hotbed for blog comments. Some businesses don't want to invite the unwanted spam and opt to disable comments on their blog posts. Some other companies on the other hand, welcome comments and reader feedback with open arms.
One way to eliminate a majority of the spam while attracting more attention for your blog is by installing the Facebook comments box on your blog. This allows your visitors to comment on your content using their Facebook profile, and when they do comment it is shown to their friends via the news feed. This is a great way to introduce a new audience to your brand.
4. Ask Your Readers to Share & Provide an Incentive
Sometimes you just simply have to ask your readers to share your content. A simple snippet at the end of your content such as this will do wonders: "If you liked this blog post please give it a 'Like' or 'Tweet' it so others can enjoy it as well!"
If you want to take it a step further you can provide an incentive to your readers. Coupon codes, top tier content and tips, and insider newsletters are just some of the things you can use to entice your readers with to encourage social sharing. Viral Lock is a premium plugin that requires the user to Tweet, Facebook Like, or Google+ Share your post to unlock premium content.
Every time your content is shared, liked, and tweeted, a social signal occurs. Social signals are a very good indication that a brand is popular, and having a strong social media presence is important from large corporations all the way to brand new startups. Weston Bergmann, lead investor in BetaBlox, an equity-based business incubator for startup entrepreneurs in Kansas City touched on the importance of being social stating, "Developing a large social buzz is important because it's an indicator that what you have to say is important, and you'll be rewarded with an audience ready to listen."
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