ask for shares

Asking for shares on your content, especially if you’re starting out, might feel an awful lot like asking a friend or family member for money: uncomfortable, and somewhat embarrassing. Luckily, you don’t have to be stuck in this share-free zone forever. By knowing the best practices that will make your content delightfully share-worthy, you can boost its impact across the web and succeed in making your content as popular as you’re dreaming of. Keep reading to find out our best tips to earning your maximum mileage on social media with every post you create. Let’s delve in! The Secret Sauce to Social Shares: Simpler Than You Think (or Is it?) Social shares, via platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc, are essential to the success of your online content (blogs, etc). It can do everything, from helping you build your brand to extending your reach – and allowing you to boost your online content marketing efforts to the next level. But how do you start to tap into the immense power of social content sharing? The answer is by connecting with people that can spread the word about your content, find your content truly useful to them, and boost your reputation online – your audience. Once you’ve connected with the right audience, did you know that simply and honestly asking for social shares is one of the most effective ways to get them? It sounds way too simple, but Wordstream lists it as the #1 way to earn a share. ASK your readers! Bloggers that don’t ask will likely never experience the level of popularity they want from their online content. Keep in mind that to earn the recognition of both customers, readers and peers, you’ll need to craft content that earns a high number of shares across the web. We’ll share tips below with more on that. And by asking for social shares and having content that has the potential to get somewhere (it’s level of usefulness, interest, etc.) you can expand your reach and become an authority in your given industry. 7 Best Practices for Earning Your Most Social Shares (Ever) I’ve divided my 7 key points into two lists: #1-4 in my list below are mandatory prerequisites you should be checking off your list before you even ask for a share. Next, #5-8 will detail what to do to physically see shares happen. Learn and enjoy! Pre-publish List: Practices 1-4 These four points are essential to make sure you get the most potential social juice out of every single post. Keep in mind the first one is optional, but absolutely worthwhile. Enjoy! 1. Optional but powerful: influencer love (mention other people in your content) Ready to learn how to create what I call an influencer love post? First, why is this optional? These are intensive, time-taking pieces, and they’re evergreen: you’ll only need a few if you do them right. It would be a great idea to do them periodically (for us, once/twice a year is enough). So, you don’t have to start here, or even create this type of content right away: but it’s worth it to know how to create these, and put one on your to-do list. Second: mentioning your influencers might sound simple, but you have to do it the right way. If you do, it’s a HUGE key to getting somewhere – not just with social shares in numbers, but all-around online connections and relationships (what’s more, you hone in on talking to the right people, too). Your key here is to mention your influencers in your content. These are defined as the people who are top-notch and well-respected in your industry. You can easily find them in BuzzSumo – once you’re logged in, it’s as simple as clicking on Influencers. From there, the Twitter influencers tab displays, and you can type in any topic to instantly see your influencers. Here’s what it looks like when I look up my industry (Joe Pulizzi is the man!): When you mention an influencer in your content and let him or her know about your post via social media, that influencer is likely to share your content for you, leading to increased visibility and more social shares with their audience and yours. We’ve done this – several times. We did exceptionally well on social with a blog on the Top 60 Content Marketers on Twitter. After writing and publishing it (which took a while – several weeks to compile and check the list), we tweeted to everyone we mentioned in the post that they’d been featured. Look at the stats – over 500 shares to date. A large part of the influencers retweeted our mention to their followers, which made for even more exposure. And, we had 17 comments on the piece – many from the influencers themselves. Another similar post we did where we talked about others was a roundup of the top content marketing predictions for 2016, interviewing 16 experts to get the predictions. We even took the finished copy and designed an infographic out of it. In total, it was shared over 300 times, and we saw retweets and social shares from the influencers as well. Even better, an interesting opportunity came my way from the relationships built. One of the influencers stayed connected with me, and reached out just this month randomly asking if I would like to help co-moderate a G+ group. The group has over 150,000 members. He’s even going to allow me to promote my book a bit in the group. How’s that for connections? Yeah! 2. Build reader trust before asking for social shares Fact: content is a give-take relationship. You can’t expect to take something (shares) from readers if you don’t give them something (i.e. expert content) first. With this in mind, it’s essential to ensure that your readers trust you before you start asking them to spread your content around. This is important for a few reasons. First, 78% of readers share content largely to build their own relationships. If you’re providing them with content that is not authoritative or trustworthy, you stand to damage those relationships for them, … Read more