Social Media Sharing always had an upper hand for attracting quality traffic to your website via paid/organic mean.
What is Social Media Sharing?
Availability of the internet to the masses has opened up a lot of avenues for people to engage with the world. And one of the most common ways in which people use the internet is through social media. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. have taken over the online community.
But, the question is what exactly social media is?
We can define social media as web-based sites or tools that allow people to interact by sharing and exchanging thoughts, ideas, and information. Some standard features of most social media platforms are:
Allowing users to create personal profiles/accounts:
These sites largely give users a space to curate their own online personas with features like profile pictures, personal details, like and dislikes, recent activities and much more.
Enabling user-based interaction:
one can follow, subscribe and become friends with others on social media sites. This enables people to create online social networks.
Reactions, comments, likes, and reviews:
Most often these sites promote a culture of reacting to everything. One can like, comment on and share things they respond to.
User demographic of social media:
Businesses have been quick to respond to the growing use of social media platforms as a way of marketing and promotions. What had started out to connect online with one’s family and friends has rapidly become a global stage where anything and everything is discussed. There are close to 3 million social media users worldwide now. Pew Research Center in their findings recorded that most of the youth between the ages of 18-29 were active on at least one social media platforms.
Taking various forms and evolving at a fast pace, these platforms promote a culture of reviewing, reacting, blogging, and sharing things with people. All these factors make social media a vital tool of marketing, advertising and engaging with users for business houses. A strong online presence helps them in establishing a lasting brand image. It acts as a great catalyst in generating traffic for their websites.
Tips and tricks for Social Media Sharing:
In such a competitive environment, it’s hard to maintain one’s social media presence. Following are some tips on optimizing social media sharing so it leads to maximum engagement.
Add value through your feed
Flooding the users with notifications and updates ends up being perceived as spamming and frustrates the consumer. It is more reliable strategy to consistently add meaningful content on your feed and engage with the users. Try to establish your place in the field by sharing relevant and credible information.
Capture attention by formatting how you share your links and posts
Since these social platforms engage huge masses of the population, it is important to moderate your posts to grab your audience’s attention. Keeping the following things in mind can help in this process:
Aim for short updates
Social media used to scroll through a barge of updates and if you don’t keep the posts short and concise, it is more likely to be ignored.
Try to engage:
Instead of sharing links, try to invite readers to a discussion by posing interesting questions or asking for their opinions. Such call-to-action posts fare well in terms of user engagement.
Add pictures to the posts:
Pain text can be uninviting to read and by extension, share. Some websites like facebook even prioritize posts in terms of the entertainment value they provide.
Try different approaches:
Similar posts will exhaust the audience pretty quickly. Thus, make sure to mix it up by sharing a variety of different posts.
Working in the rush hour
Since users’ access social media from varying time zones and use social media at different times, one needs to be careful about the time of sharing posts. You can use tools like Jetpack’s Publicize to make sure you post content when your audience is most likely to see it. It allows you to set the time in advance and automatically share content on all of your linked social media platforms.
What are the benefits of Social Media Sharing?
The quality of your content will not matter unless it is reaching the audience you are targeting. And social media sharing is a great way to increase your chances of being read. Some benefits of social media sharing are:
Improves reach
The easier it is to share your content online, the better it will fare on social media sites. Sharing buttons or plugins allow users to pass on your content in their own networks and can drastically improve the reach of your content.
Qualified traffic
When users share media in their own social networks, it generates word-of-mouth publicity. This is because people rely on their friends to provide them honest recommendations and are likely to click on their shared links. This ultimately increases website traffic.
Building a brand image
Social media sharing allows users to share anything that strikes a chord with their interests. It is the reliability of these personal opinions that build a loyal user base and brand image. It also adds to the growth of the company by maintaining public relations.
What is Google’s take on Social Media Sharing?
Any direct relation between social signals and SEO rankings has been constantly denied by folks at Google. But when researchers studied and analyzed the websites and webpages with higher SEO rankings, they found that social signals are an important factor of correlation between the two.
The world of social media is ever active and shares happen constantly. Since the number of shares would be a difficult equation to keep track of every day, Google does not take into account the number of social signals as a metric for rankings.
However, social media provides more visibility to your content and indirectly contributes to improving SEO rankings.
Indexing of social media pages:
When a post is shared across social media platforms, it becomes more probable it will move up indexes of search engines. This shared content on social media can design and change your entire advertising strategy. If more and more people are sharing your content, it becomes relevant enough for people and will show up in the results of similar searches.
Credibility
Credibility and authority develop over time and are critical factors or SEO rankings. Social media sharing becomes an indispensable tool for business houses to engage with users, gain their trust.
It comprises real audience
Social channels thrive on the people you are targeting your product for. It provides the perfect platform for businesses to engage with consumers, advertise, drive sales, ask for feedback and build a relationship. It capitalizes the humanized side of these platforms, providing a better insight into user trends and taking stock of their needs.