In today’s dog-eat-dog highly digital business climate, you need to build and engage a social audience to remain competitive. One of the best ways to do that is by adding social media sharing buttons to your blogs. Your blog is the hub of your media presence and adding social media sharing buttons there will boost traffic to your content, create a more quality audience and improve your search engine relevancy.
First things first. Make things easy. Social media sharing buttons can make it easier for your blog readers to share, so they may actually be more likely to do it. Think about the placement of your social media sharing buttons. Make them noticeable. They can be at the top of the page, on the side of the page, at the bottom or strategically placed within your copy. If your blog content requires a lot of reading, consider placing your social media sharing buttons closer to the top or side. That way, if readers don’t scroll down far enough, they won’t miss them.
Not sure which buttons to include? Of course you want Facebook and Twitter front and center, but for the rest, consider your audience. You want the social media are they using – not avoiding. If you don’t know, just include all of them. It won’t take long for you to learn which your audience prefers so you can delete the others, and you WILL want to do that. Word to the wise…the more buttons you use can clutter your content. A lot of social media sharing buttons can also make it hard for readers to decide which to use, so in the end they may not even pull the trigger at all. Finally, the wrong buttons can create negative social proof and a low share could dissuade your viewers from sharing.
Social media sharing buttons can make it easier than ever for your audience to spread your content around the web. So go ahead, share, share alike and you will grow your audience and multiply your social media shares on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.