Every website owner, at some point, realizes the importance of social media sharing. Social marketing is worth your efforts, as it boosts your brand recognition and loyalty,positively impacts conversion rate, increases inbound traffic and betters search engine rankings.
However, the following question appears: How to get your posts shared-worthy? And I’m about to provide the answer to it in this post.
Today, we’ll speak on how to make your blog posts the ones that go viral in social networks and will look into 7 tips to get your posts shared-worthy. Are you ready to start the exploration? Let’s go!
Tip # 1: Add strong, positive emotions to the posts you publish
Recent research shows that the content that gets shared most is the content that elicits strong, positive emotions. Such emotions as awe, laughter, amusement and joy elicit a desire to spread them further, so the articles that elicit such emotions are bound to go viral.
Other studies have illustrated the same results with Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance emotional state model. This model ranks the emotions that some piece of information elicits on three scales: pleasure scale, arousal scale and dominance scale.
- Pleasure scale ranks how much positive emotions one feels after reading an article. Joy, admiration, happiness are the High Pleasure emotions, when sadness, distress and grief occupy the displeasure end of the scale.
- Arousal scale shows how strong the emotion felt is.
- Dominance scale shows how much in control of a situation a person feels. Positive emotions tend to rank high on the dominance scale, when negative ones, such as fear and sadness are rather submissive.
The takeaway from this is that if you want to get your article shared, you should get it eliciting the emotional response that ranks high on all the three scales. Your article should elicit strong, positive emotions that make a person feel empowered and thus ignite the desire to share your piece of content with others.
Tip # 2: Add Social Media Sharing Call to Action Buttons to your articles
Make sure that you include content sharing buttons after every post and make them modern and noticeable. If it takes more then 2 (maximum 3) steps to get your content shared, you’re likely to lose potential shares. Moreover, make sure that you go for 3 – 4 social sharing options, for instance Facebook, Twitter, Google + and Pinterest social sharing buttons.
For example, in this fashion WordPress theme by TemplateMonster, a pretty noticeable social sharing widget floats on the left when users are scrolling down the page. Whenever they feel like sharing the post, they can do this in two simple clicks. As a result, there is no need to scroll to the end of the article (or back to top) to share it.
Tip # 3: Ask People to Share with ReTweet, Pin it and so on
People read your content for the purpose of learning information that you offer. As sharing is not a primary motivation for interacting with your content, it’s smart to remind people that they can actually share your content and bring value to their friends and followers in social networks.
Remind your audience about social sharing with a call to action that’s hard to miss. When a CTA is present, Pinterest post gets 80 percent more pins. Tweets that ask people to share get 51 percent more retweets. These numbers are pretty impressive, so it’s worth adding a sharing call to action to every your post.
Tip # 4: Add Images and Visual Resources to Your Articles
Internet made people used to see text lushly illustrated with photographs, images and diagrams. This concerns social sharing as well. For instance, tweets with images are 94 percent more likely to be shared than tweets without any visual enhancements.
If you want your content to get shared, you should carefully consider the imagery that you adorn your posts with. You’ll hardly surprise people with posed looks of the heavily photoshopped Stock images. Go for authentic photographs that show real emotions of real people in real situations. Such images help people relate to your articles and make them want to share your posts more.
Tip # 5: Post Listicles
Are you familiar with the word ‘listicle’? It stands for the article based on a list. Actually, you are currently reading one of such articles.
People love lists: they stick in mind as the information presented in them is well-structured and easy to perceive. Want a proof: visit some popular blog and check out the Most Popular Articles section. You’ll see that the majority of them start with ‘Top 10…’, ’25 Best…’, etc.
The modern study of content types that get shared that’s based on 1 million articles shows that listicles are the second most popular content type to share, superseded only by inforgraphics. As writing a list-based article is less time and resource consuming than creating a well-delivered infographic, listicles appear to be one of the most accessible and effective content types to go viral.
Tip # 6: Write Long Articles Full of Insights
You’ll hardly surprise someone with short articles that just tap on the issue, instead of going in depth. Internet is full of them. On the other side, long, detailed, underpinned by studies articles are a rarity as they require a decent amount of research and understanding of the topic. Studies show that less than 5% of blog owners write posts that are longer than 1500 words on the regular basis.
If you want your content go viral, create epic content that covers the issue in depth and is written with a decent amount of thought. Here are the findings of a recent content audit.
Tip # 7: Create Round-Ups and Ask Contributors to Promote Them
One simple trick in getting your content shared is posting roundups. A roundup is a type of an article, in which you ‘round up’ the opinions of different experts on the given topic. After you get the roundup done and post it, you can ask all the contributors to promote the article through their channels.
Studies show that the content, which is written by an authoritative person, gets more shares. If the experts you asked to participate in the roundup are true authorities, you’ll reach for their large audiences with such a post, and, possibly, not only get more shares for the roundup, but significantly increase your own online audience.
Conclusions
These are the 7 important tips to get your content shared-worthy. Mind the ease of social sharing on your website, create content that elicits strong, positive emotions, go for lists and round-ups, ask people to share. If you create in-depth, quality content, which provides value for your website audience, and create all the conditions to encourage shares, you’re likely to reach cult following in social networks and get to new heights with social marketing.
If you know some more tips on how to get posts shared-worthy, feel free to share them in the Comments section below. This will be much appreciated!
Stay tuned!
Article written in partnership with our friends from Template Monster. Go check them out!