How to Increase your Content Sharing by 700%

written by Jeff Bullas

Creating a website and an on-line presence for your brand was an easy decision a decade ago. All you had to do was get a website company to design and develop your website add a  few lines of text for each page and then “set and forget”. The static website was the status quo and content very rarely changed month in month out.
Fast forward to today and websites are dynamic and interactive on-line brand portals where you  need to actively optimize for search engines so potential customers will find you with key words and phrases.
You need to respond to comments on the corporate blog and engage with your customers on your other web properties such as Facebook and Twitter.
White papers need to be created and published and eBooks are the norm especially in knowledge industries.
Embedded on-line videos are now considered as a standard feature of a website and a corporate branded YouTube channel  is becoming essential in your content marketing strategy.
So content needs to be added regularly in a variety of  media formats. Brands are becoming publishers.

Content Needs Marketing

The reality is that creating that content is just part of the work of optimizing your on-line assets and by just publishing you have only just started and the real work now has to be done….marketing your content and sharing it should be part of that marketing strategy!
Lee Odden of  the Top Rank Blog has created this diagram that reflects the content marketing trilogy that highlights activities and media that should be an essential part of the mix of optimizing your on-line brand.

The three essential keys to marketing your content is optimizing your on-line properties for discovery through search, social and email. Providing a variety of multi-media content that caters to the viewing and reading preferences for your audience and finally make it easy to share.

How to Make Sharing Easy

I don’t know how many times I go to a website or blog and want to share the content but the website design makes it hard to share. There are no “Tweet”, LinkedIn or Facebook “share” buttons to make it a no brainer for me to share it with my followers, fans and connections.
Some recent research reveals the impact and importance of adding a few buttons to your blog.
Brightedge conducted a detailed social share analysis of 4 million randomly sample tweets and discovered that sites that had adopted the “Tweet” button drove almost 7 times more link mentions(sharing) on average than sites that did not have the button.

This one simple feature has the potential to put your content sharing on steroids and accelerate brand discovery.

Top Brands are Ignoring Optimization for Sharing

The research also discovered that nearly half of the top 10,000 websites do not have social sharing plugins.

If this is the case for the top websites and blogs I would suggest  that the smaller companies and organisations participation rate on including sharing buttons would be significantly lower.
When I added a “Tweet” button to my blog the increase in content sharing and traffic was significant and instantaneous.
In a lot of cases uploading a social plugin and including a “Tweet” button on your blog is a 5-10 minute exercise especially if you have a WordPress blog.
http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/09/05/how-to-increase-your-content-sharing-by-700/