Why the success of your blogs depend on the effectiveness of your social media
Generating great content is essential to help a website achieve a good search engine ranking, however what you don’t want is to be posting on social media and the web, with no one reading or sharing it.
If you use social media well it should make content marketing easy. The idea is that instead of doing all the work yourself, you encourage your readers to do it for you – by sharing your content with their audience, you can multiply many times how often it is seen.
If you find this is not happening, it might be because the content you are generating and posting isn’t very social media friendly.
So what do you do if your readers are not sharing your content?
Firstly, you need to review your content to make sure it is social media friendly. Here are a few quick tips to do this:
- Make sure you use meta tags
With some CMS systems, such as Wordpress with its Yoast SEO plugin it gives you a range of options for meta data from what is contained within current and previous blogs. Don’t rely on this completely though, it’s important to ensure you have your key search terms within your meta tags and use regular links throughout your blogs.
- Write emotive headlines as people pick up on these
The headline of the blog is very important, especially from a social media sharing point of view. Research has shown that headlines with some emotional value get shared more. For example, instead of, in the world of construction marketing, ‘Why indoor air quality is important...’ a headline more likely to be shared would be ‘Why indoor air quality is so important to asthma sufferers.’
- Make sure your social sharing buttons are in the right place
Research has shown that the top left hand side of the page performs best in most situations. Therefore, as most websites load content from the left hand side of the page, this means that the most noticeable place to add content is likely to be on the top left, so post your social sharing buttons here.
- Post your blog at the best time
Most blogs are read in the mornings. However, studies have shown that men tend to be more likely to read content in the evenings. Here are some, surprising findings:
- Monday is the best day of the week to publish content.
- Most blog posts receive most traffic around 11am.
- Visitors to the blog on Saturdays and early mornings tend to leave more comments.
- Monday and Tuesday are the highest drivers of inbound traffic to a site.
So the rule of thumb is to publish content early in the week, and early in the morning to maximize your social impact.
However, studies by analytics platform TrackMaven have shown that tweets actually receive more retweets on Sundays. So if it’s social engagement sharing that you’re after, it might be worth considering Sunday posting.
- Use ‘click to tweet’ on your blog
When you’ve written and posted your blog, you need to make sure it has a bit of coding behind it to enable viewers to easily ‘click to tweet’ to enable sharing. The code could also provide instructions to networks like Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest by telling them which image, title and description to use when the post goes live. There are various tools you can subscribe to for doing this, or our web team can implement this for you.
- Use images with your posts
A really good way to make sure your posts look good and are shared more is to use them with images. A post with an image with get your content more exposure and, with latest updates to mobile applications, it means that images can be seen more easily by those on the move.
So, as you can see, there are a number of things you can do to improve social sharing of your posts.
If you want some help with content sharing, please drop our social media team a line on hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 01709 300130.