Social media sites has become an integral part of our today’s online marketing strategies; and no doubt every marketer now uses it to drives traffic, engagement, leads and consequently, increase sales potential.
As a content marketer, among what you should really care about is the impact the numbers of shares, likes, re-tweet and +1 your content could get which can affect your ranking in search engine result pages. Though Google has never admit to the fact that social media shares affect ranking.
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How to optimize your content for social media shares and traffic[/caption]But going by the result of Moz 2013 ranking factors experiment that proves number of Google+ a page receive contributes to it actual ranking position. With that said, here is a list of seven effective tactics to optimize your content for social media shares and traffic:
1. The Post Headline
If perhaps there is just only one factor that will stand in between you and your potential audience on social media…….that will certainly be the article headline.
In one of my recent blog post, I made mention why your social media updates needs to carry a very strong compelling headline. Social media audience is always in a hurry and always scans through status; your post headline should define clearly what your information is all about.
If readers had to think for 10 seconds before having a clue into what your information is all about, your whole article could as well just be swimming out of the gate. You probably don’t want that.
A good article headline will instantly tell the readers what he should expect from reading the article and what type of information it is. You might want experiment with different types of headline to see which works best and why.
2. Use Big Attractive Images
It is no more a breaking news the importance of images in social media updates. According to a research conducted in the year 2012 by MDG blog, it appear that posts with images get views 94% more than post without images.
Use big attractive images in your post and set it as the feature image for the post so it get displayed alongside your post.
3. Tell Stories
It is true that logic, facts, education, fictions, or even your personal observation about things or places could easily turn to Stella post; but this fact remain the same……people are more consume and persuasive in stories than any other type of information.
Fact can be challenged, everyone knows that fictions are not real; and even the syllabus that the educational system runs could change from year to year but the story of a man cannot be change or doubt.
If you’re selling a product, tell a story about the pleasant even that took place between your sales rep and customers. If you’re content marketer, your journey so far is a very good story to tell. I bet if your readers won’t appreciate this most than any of your other content format.
Go through your content archives and dig deep; searching for those post that have receive the highest numbers of shares and comments, certainly it will come out as the one you incorporates your personal experience in to it.
4. Share in Relevant Places
There is no point in writing a good quality piece of information about how to lose weight then going ahead to share it on i tones.
That would certainly be a wasted effort of time, resources and energy. Same apply to social media sites like Facebook groups. Share your articles in relevant places, groups, networks, marketing channels etc.
5. Optimize for Search engine
This mustn’t go without saying; ensure that your content is well optimized for both search engine and users. What to note here is that a good search engine friendly article, is as well a user friendly content.
Optimize your keyword to be identified and understood easily by search engine and remember you also need to do that for the users too. If users had to read up to the fifth paragraph before knowing if the content is relevant to his query, then you might as well be misleading your readers.
6. Make Friends and lots of it
Your social network of friends will help in this regards a lot; and if you’re not paying attention to the circle of friends you keep on social media, is time to look into it.
Why keeping friends who enjoy in talking about birthday parties and stuffs like that when your primary duty on social media sites is to build your brand awareness and grow your customer data base?
Look out for friends and influential who share same ideas and are closely in same niche as you. These are people who understand and value what you’re doing and could help spread your content across to their followers.
By time I started using Facebook, my friend list was full of families and close associates who never heard of the world “blogging“, and some didn’t even know the difference between Facebook and the internet.
You can imagine what categories of people I keep.
I remember telling my elder brother that I own and manage a blog on the internet; he asked a blog? Do I mean Facebook? I don’t know how to explain further but directed him to my blog so he could see what a blog look like and this just makes everything more worsen as he couldn’t even understand what I’m doing right there on my blog.
Make sure your lists of friends are people that can help in one way or the other with what you’re doing.
7. Include Call-to-action
The best way to make people do something you wanted them to do is to tell them to do it and show them how to do it.
Include a cal-to-action button in your post updates like sharing button, destination web page url etc. Whatever is your purpose of marketing content, provide ways for your target audience to connect with you and your brand and help spread the word out of your blog.
Word of mouth and individual recommendation are still the best form of advertisements that guarantee sales than any other form of advert.
What other ways you know out there good for optimizing your content for social media traffic, shares, likes, +1?
Would love to here from you...