It’s time to get your website users and blog readers to push your buttons… and of course, we mean that in a good way.
If you have a business website or blog, one of the primary objectives is to get people to talk about it and share your content with others. Today it’s easier than ever to make that happen. The social media craze has spawned ‘social sharing’, and while that term would have meant something very different in past decades (think soap operas, coffee shop poets or California in the 70’s), it now means sharing something cool with your network of friends, family and/or customers on their social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn – without ever leaving your site.
Like social media in general, social sharing is proving not to be just a fad, but a phenomenon. Social sharing has already surpassed the forward-to-a-friend option many times over. It is here to stay (at least until the next big thing comes along). And your business can, and should, be benefiting from social sharing.
Adding social sharing buttons to your website or blog is usually a quick and effective way to promote content and increase page views. Let’s say that you have a gardening supply business and you’ve just written a blog about “Using the Right Equipment for Your Organic Garden”. The blog is full of excellent tips and tricks from all your years of experience in organic gardening. By putting social sharing buttons for Facebook and Twitter, people who read your blog and really enjoy it can immediately share it on their Facebook page and tweet the URL out to their network. Suddenly your blog is being promoted to a much wider audience than your normal readership. These new readers may become devoted followers of your blog and in time, customers. And, as an added bonus, all this additional traffic will also increase your search engine ranking.
Blogs aren’t the only things being shared either. Shared links, photos, videos, emails – virtually anything content-wise can, and is, being shared. Have a photo of a new product? Have a video of your latest commercial? Make it easy for your fans to share it and take it viral for you.
There are a lot of choices out there for social buttons. Facebook is the obvious choice, with over 500 million active users. Each week, five billion (yes, that’s with a "B") pieces of content are shared on Facebook – in some estimations, that’s about 44% of all the social sharing on the internet. Twitter, with an estimated 55 million daily tweets, is next with about 29% of all social sharing. We also like LinkedIn because it is a site for like-minded professionals and social sharing has recently become easier for LinkedIn members. There are plenty of other social sharing platforms too, such as your Google Business Profile, Snapchat (Smart Phone app), MIX (formerly StumbleUpon), Reddit, etc. In fact, believe it or not, you have well over 80 social sharing buttons to choose from. But we recommend staying with just the most relevant ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
While there are plenty of advantages to putting social sharing buttons on your website, there are a few disadvantages too. Be careful about too much clutter on your web pages. Having a lot of social sharing buttons can look junky and disrupt your layout design. Putting buttons haphazardly on your page can confuse your reader as well – and a confused user will probably do nothing (other than leave your site). There can also be ‘bugs’ in the interface that could mess up the functionality of your page (yikes!).
We recommend only using the social sharing buttons you think are going to be the most significant to your business. If you want more than one or two, you probably should consider one of the social sharing plugins like the ones listed in the WordPress.org plugin repository.
It’s never been easier to get people to share your information with their personal networks. Give social sharing a try today, and watch your content find a wider audience.
If you would like further information about how social sharing can help grow your business, please contact one of our friendly Captivation representatives today. See how we can reduce your operating expenses, increase your productivity and make your company more competitive.
