Have you been avoiding social media? Are you doing so because you’ve failed to reach your goals in the past?
By taking a simple and straightforward approach to social media, you can change your fortunes in the future.
The best tool for getting more social shares isn’t a tool at all. Instead, it all comes down to producing high quality, in-depth content.
When you create better content than your competitors, it won’t be long before social shares begin to pick up.
But, of course, there is always help to be had. Once you create a killer piece of content, you need to do your part in getting it shared across all major platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
If you need a little help getting more social shares, the following nine tools could be just what you’re looking for. It’s not likely that you will use each one every day, but you should definitely learn more about all of them.
1. WP Social Sharing
When people visit your blog to read your content, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to share via social media. And, this is where the WP Social Sharing plugin comes into play.
With this tool, you can add visually appealing social sharing buttons for all of the most popular platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Other key features include:
- 100% responsive
- Customizable
- Ability to add text before the buttons
- Order the icons to suit the style of your website
- Auto display
While this tool has some of the best ratings among social sharing WordPress plugins, there are others to consider. I enjoy the simplicity of WP Social Sharing, but that doesn’t mean it’ll suit your every want and need.
You should learn more about alternatives, including:
Regardless of which plugin you choose, your goal remains the same: to help visitors easily share your content via social media.
2. Portent’s Content Idea Generator
You may be wondering what this has to do with getting more social shares, because it’s not exactly clear.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator is all about helping you to dig up content ideas and create targeted titles.
Think about that for a second. People are more likely to read your content when they are attracted to the headline. And, when they read your content, there is a greater chance of it being shared on social media.
If your headlines have fallen short in the past, the use of this free tool can swing things in your favor in the future.
Let’s look at an example for the search phrase, “social media marketing.” The tool spits out a variety of ideas, including:
- 14 Unexpected Uses for Social Media Marketing
- An Expert Interview About Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Marketing by the Numbers
As you can see, this one tool provides a variety of ideas for this phrase. Best yet, you can continue to generate results until you find exactly what you are looking for.
If you still don’t understand the importance of effective headlines, here is a statistic shared by Copyblogger:
“On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”
It’s one thing for people to read your headline copy. It’s another thing entirely for them to read the rest of your content. Make sure that you use a tool like this to help you generate attractive headlines that engage your audience.
3. Image Sharer
Did you ever take the time to think about how hard it is for visitors to share images from your website?
Sharing text-based content on social media is easy enough, but the same doesn’t hold true for images. And, if your images have something unique to offer your audience and can help boost your business, it’s a must that your readers are able to easily share them.
Image Sharer is a tool that helps you do just that. It’s described on its official homepage as follows:“Image Sharer makes it dead simple for your readers to auto-magically share the images on your site and link back to you, driving you viral traffic!”
What more could you want? This tool makes it simple for readers to share your images. Even better, this helps build backlinks and increase traffic.
Getting started is as simple as following a couple basic steps:
- Choose where your images can be shared. This includes all of the most popular social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
- Control where the icons appear on your image. When a visitor hovers over your image, you dictate where the icons show up.
You should already understand the importance of using high quality images on your website. Not only does it help from an SEO perspective, but it also keeps readers engaged.
To take this one step further, now is the time to implement the use of Image Sharer. This tool can help increase your backlink count, traffic and number of social shares.
4. Shareaholic
The tagline of this tool says it all:
“The all-in-one content amplification platform.”
Let’s dig into the finer details of this statement to better understand what Shareaholic is all about.
There are four ways that the tool helps take your content to the next level:
- Acquire. Reach a large audience through promoted content and native ads.
- Engage. Increase time on site, pageviews, repeat visitors and social shares.
- Analyze. Better understand your audience, including the type of content they are looking for and what has performed best in the past.
- Monetize. Generate more revenue from your website via affiliate marketing, ads and other methods.
When it comes to the Shareaholic platform and its impact on social shares, there are several areas in which it can help:
- Share buttons.
- Shareable images.
- Follow buttons.
While some tools provide nothing more than the ability to implement share buttons, this one goes above and beyond. For example, its shareable images feature allows you to add smart share buttons to any image.
As one of the most advanced tools on this list, you can spend a lot of time learning more about Shareaholic and its many features. Chances are that at least one feature will change your marketing approach, while helping to generate more social shares.
5. SocialRank
If Twitter and/or Instagram are your social media platforms of choice, SocialRank is a tool that deserves your attention.
With this solution, you have access to a variety of features for identifying, organizing and managing your followers.
It’s one thing to know that your Twitter and Instagram audiences are growing, but that doesn’t do you much good in regards to who these people are.
SocialRank helps with this, in the following ways:
- Segments your followers based on a variety of criteria, such as most valuable, most engaged, best followers and most followed.
- Filters your followers to target the right people at the right time. Some of the filters to use include bio keywords, location, activity and number of followers.
While all of this is helpful, it’s the ability to take action that really makes SocialRank a winner. After you locate the right people, those who can help you spread your message through social shares, you can take action by doing the following:
- Sending direct messages
- Exporting to CSV
- Exporting to PDF
- Building lists
- Saving searches
SocialRank can help with many things, including boosting social shares, influencer marketing and better understanding your audience. It may only be for use with Twitter and Instagram, but the popularity of these two services continues to grow.
6. Reddit
What does Reddit have to do with getting more social shares? Well, it’s not an exact science, but this social news networking service can help you to get your content in front of a huge audience. And, by huge, I mean HUGE. Reddit has “34 million unique users and 8 billion monthly page views.”
There are two keys to Reddit success:
- Share interesting, unique content.
- Don’t spam the site.
As basic as it may sound, these two details give you a starting point. For those who want to learn more about Reddit marketing, this guide provides detailed information and advice, as well as step-by-step tips.
While it may not be considered a traditional social media service, such as Twitter and Facebook, that’s exactly what Reddit is. For this reason, you should keep this site in mind, when it comes to boosting social shares.
Just the same, as with any social media platform, Reddit is a great source for sharing content, engaging others and pushing tons of traffic to your website. With the right content, your comments and shares will go through the roof. Additionally, success on Reddit often makes its way to other social sites.
7. Canva
Your goal is to get as many social shares as possible, all without annoying your readers. One of the best ways of doing so is to vary your content.Text heavy blog posts are beneficial for many reasons, including the way in which they are shared and the opportunity to boost search engine traffic.
But, remember this: content with images is more likely to be shared by your audience. This is why so many internet marketers consider Canva one of their favorite tools.
In addition to creating images for your blog posts, there is something else Canva can do: help you create attractive, easy to follow infographics.
As a non-designer, it’s easy to believe that you have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire a professional artist. But, Canva helps protect against this. It allows you to create high quality infographics on a budget and within your time constraints.
Getting started is a simple four step process:
- Upload your own images or select from the Canva library.
- Change the fonts to match your website, style and subject matter.
- Change the background.
- Change the colors.
When you take these steps, while also adding in your own content, the end result is an infographic that is destined to be shared by your audience.
HubSpot shares a variety of statistics regarding visual content marketing, including the following:
- Colored visuals increase a person’s willingness to read content by 80%.
- More than 30% of marketers noted that visual assets are their most important content.
Along with the above, here is one of the most important statistics you’ll ever come across:
“Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content.”
If that doesn’t prove to you that a tool such as Canva can boost social shares, nothing will.
8. Tweriod
Before we examine the finer details of this tool, let’s look at how it’s described:
“Tweriod gives you the best times to tweet. We analyse both your tweets and your followers’ tweets so you can start tweeting when it makes most sense to reach others.”
Basically, this tool tells you when your Twitter audience is online. As a result, you are provided advice on the best times to tweet, thus increasing your chance for more shares.
As you dig deeper, using Tweriod will begin to make more sense. And, here’s why: if your audience isn’t online when you are tweeting, you can’t expect them to read your content and engage. In other words, your updates are falling on deaf ears.
Conversely, if you publish tweets when your audience is paying attention, it is only natural that you have the opportunity to secure more social shares.
Once you provide all of the required information, Tweriod gives you an analysis of your Twitter account. It will look something like this:
By following the advice, you know that every tweet is reaching the largest possible audience. This doesn’t guarantee more social shares, but it definitely tilts the odds in your favor.
The only downside of Tweriod is that you are only provided with data from Twitter. But, if this is one of your preferred social networks, it’s a great tool that can help you improve engagement.
9. Google Trends
As a blogger, you know one thing to be true: it can be a challenge to come up with fresh content ideas on a regular basis.One week you have a few ideas that you are sure your audience will love. But, the next week, everything dries up and you are left to search for a few killer content ideas that will turn heads.
This is where a tool like Google Trends can help. In short, it provides you with the top stories at any time of the day.
If you need to drill down past this, you can run a category or location search. You can also explore topics via the search bar.
So, how can this help you get more social shares? Easy. People like to share information on social media that is trending. So, when you write about trending topics, there is a greater chance that your followers, among others, will share it.
You don’t need to create every post around a trending topic, but this is a habit to get into. This is particularly true if your blog covers a topic that is regularly in the news, such as politics, the economy, sports or business.
Google Trends is free and simple to use, with the only downside being that you have to act fast. Remember, a topic that is trending now may not be trending in a few hours. If you want to make the most of a hot topic on social media, don’t delay in creating related content and pushing it through your platforms.
Conclusion
There are approximately 2.3 billion active social media users in the world. Not everybody is interested in what you have to say, but chances are that your niche is large enough that increased social sharing is possible.
When you combine high quality content with the use of these tools, you can boost social shares and benefit from the result.
