Best Tips To Increase Your Social Media Shares 2024

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Best Tips To Increase Your Social Media Shares

Brands, organizations, and institutions use social media platforms every single day to connect with their audiences, raise awareness, and drive leads and business. With an engaged following on one or more major social networks, brands can effectively spread the word about campaigns, new initiatives, and new products and services.

However, simply having 1,000 Facebook fans or 200 Twitter followers is not the best indicator of social media success. It’s possible to have thousands of followers who never read your posts or click on your links. The key is to build a thriving online community of your ideal fans, the ones who'll actively engage with your content, share it with their networks, and ultimately become paying customers.

What Is Social Media?

Social media is a fancy term for forums, blogs, and networking websites where people can communicate. This isn’t your old-school blog – this is more social. People use social media to connect with friends, learn about new topics, find out how to do something, and make new friends. Social media, for example, is how you can connect with your boss and vice versa.

Here are a few examples of what social media is and how it works:

A business owner who has just gone to college and now wants to build a career in entrepreneurship can use social media to connect with people in the same field to get advice and share their experiences.
A mother who is learning to sew can share her finished products on Instagram.

The term “social media” first came into popular use in the mid to late 1990s as the first iterations of Facebook and Twitter were developed. These networks allow users to interact with each other (especially others in their network) in a virtual environment.

Those who aren’t familiar with these sites are like huge bulletin boards where users can upload, create, and share content to build their online presence. Not long after social media became popular, social entrepreneurs started to apply a new strategy that turned the tables on the traditional advertising model and started using a new viral loop approach.

Social media is a collective term for websites and applications which focus on communication, community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

Many individuals will use social media to stay in touch and interact with friends and family, while others use it to communicate with different communities. Many businesses will use social media as a way to market and promote their products.

In addition, business-to-consumer (B2C) websites include social components, such as comment fields for users. Other tools have been created to aid in tracking the number of mentions and brand perception.
Social media has become larger and more accessible thanks to accessing mobile applications, with some examples of social media including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

In business, social media is used for marketing products, promoting brands, connecting to current customers and foster new business. In terms of customer feedback, social media makes it easy to tell a company and everyone else about their experiences with that company, whether those experiences are good or bad.

The business can also respond quickly to positive and negative feedback, attend to customer problems and maintain, regain or rebuild customer confidence. Social media is also often used for crowdsourcing.

Customers can use social networking sites to offer ideas for future products or improvements to current ones. In IT projects, crowdsourcing usually involves blending business and IT services from a mix of internal and external providers, sometimes with input from customers and/or the general public.

Benefits Of Increasing Social Media Shares

Over the last few years, we’ve come to expect many of our purchases and interactions online to be instantaneous. Being able to make the final payment to buy an item online, grab a poster from the stands at a live concert or event, or interact with a brand online when it launches is something most of us have experienced. Creating an effective online community and integrating content across all social channels is a key to social media success.

Having a loyal following and engaged communities allows you to engage with your followers and help grow your brand. Social media shares can be terrific strategies to bring in new followers and increase your organic reach on social media. Here are a few important benefits of social media shares:

Increased follower numbers,
Increased web traffic to your website,
Increased exposure of your product and services,
Building relationships with your community,
Improved reputation,
Greater influence over your market,
Better chances of business leads,
Better experience of your customers, and
Decreased costs of advertising, and
Increased leads and sales.

Social media deserves your attention now more than ever. Although it may not immediately result in a flood of cash or that “viral” moment you are hoping for, there’s so much that society can do for your brand, both short and long term.

Here’s our breakdown of the social media benefits that often fly under the radar for modern businesses. Simply put, social media is a potential goldmine of business intelligence.

How so? For starters, think about the transparent nature of social media. We’re able to see unfiltered, real-time conversations between consumers and brands alike. If you want to know what a brand is doing well or likewise what customers are complaining about, it’s all out there in the open.

Unlike awkward phone calls or lengthy emails, social customer service is quick and to the point. Providing social customer service means having meaningful, back-and-forth conversations with your customers that are oftentimes forward-facing.

In other words, prospects, customers and competitors alike can see how you interact with your buyers. Putting positive interactions front and center is a huge plus for any business. Whether it’s listening to feedback or addressing specific concerns, an ongoing advantage of social media is that it’s the perfect place to provide speedy service and let customers know that you’re there to lend a helping hand.

Research Trending Topics

Take a look at what your audience is interested in and find trending topics to plug into your social media accounts. For example, let’s say that the Facebook trends reports that are currently trending are ice cream and rabbits. If you’re a small business or startup company, you might think of ways to get your content in front of people looking at these specific subjects.

When people see that a new ice cream shop opened up in their area, they may click on the business’ page to learn more. Look at the sites where your audience is coming from on social media and learn how your posts perform. Is your Facebook page ranking in the top results for that niche, or are you in the back-end pages of results?

It pays to do your research ahead of time. Having a better understanding of what successful content looks like in your industry increases the likelihood of being shared. Use a tool like BuzzSumo to help identify top shared content. You can search for top shared content about a topic or keyword, results sorted by overall shares.

Keep in mind that this research aims not to duplicate existing content but rather to identify popular topics in your niche and add something new to the conversation. Make it your goal to go above and beyond top shared content.

Provide Context In Headlines

There’s a strong chance your content is being snubbed if your headline fails to grab people. It becomes increasingly important to hook your audience with a headline as online attention spans continue to dwindle.

Social media audiences tend to favour snackable content, bite-sized pieces that quickly convey their intent. BuzzFeed articles are essentially engineered to take advantage of this trend: easily consumed and shared. They further entice the audience to read the content by addressing them individually.

For example, you’ll encounter dozens of instances of “you” and “your” throughout. What else goes into a headline worth clicking? The conductor analyzed user preferences and found that users gravitate towards numbers, personalization, educational resources, and questions.

When shared, well-crafted headline functions like a status update in that it will summarize the user’s opinion or awareness of a subject. Want your best content to receive more shares across social networks? Start thinking about your headlines in a social context.

Include A Visual In Every Post

If your content consists mostly of text-only posts, it is easy to become disconnected from your audience and their purchasing decisions. Every visual element of every post should support and reinforce the text. Strive to create visual stories that convey your points more effectively.

Even if you have a static layout, include a branded photo or a close-up of your company logo and embedded graphics that align with your company's goals and help convey your message to your target audience. Provide “after the action” content.

You should also keep a record of the reactions and responses to your post and answer questions. This will help your audience better understand your company’s goals and allow them to form a better relationship with your brand and further support the cause.

An increase in social media shares can be attributed to visual posts rather than text-only ones. Sure, a picture is worth a thousand words, but one thousand words are worth just one picture.

So, incorporating a mix of images, videos, and infographics is an effective way to grab the audience’s attention. Each post you create should include at least one visual element representing your company’s culture, values, and messaging. Photos, drawings, GIFs, charts, graphics, and memes are great visual content options.

The visual aspect of social media can play a huge role in how effective the posts are received. People will feel more connected and inspired by what they see when they share a post with others. According to market research firm CEB, 72% of adults worldwide use visuals for marketing purposes, but only 55% consider visual content informative. When putting together your social media marketing strategy, you should take that statistic into account.

It can be easy to get into a black hole of text-based posts, but each post should incorporate a photo or visual component. Instagram, for example, offers numerous photo filters that allow you to enhance your posts easily. These photo filters can bring a little extra personality to your content and turn your posts into creative advertisements.

Be Proactive In Listening And Responding To Your Online Community

Consistently post compelling content across multiple platforms. Engage your audience in some way. Share third-party content. Unify your audience. Be sociable and have fun with your community. Work with current and potential partners.

Engage your audience and build meaningful connections by creating useful, meaningful, and appealing content for your audience. To increase your social media shares and bring more eyeballs to your brand, you must publish engaging content, regularly engage with your audience, build meaningful connections, and work with trusted partners.

It is a great idea to get to know your audience and their needs? Test ideas to find what resonates. Keep your efforts fresh by sharing new content and responding to comments on each post. Build relationships and engagement with your community. Take the time to think about what people in your community would like to hear from you.

Test and refine new ideas on your blog and share them with your community before rolling them out to your other social media channels. Your audience is more likely to share their experience and content if they feel connected to you. Focus on creating great content that people want to share with their social communities, rather than simply adding some followers to your list.

Change Your Page Profile Photos And Cover Photos

Depending on which platform you are using, it is possible to repurpose your cover and profile photos into different images or even different pictures entirely. This can help improve your page’s popularity and drive more organic traffic to your page. It’s best to have a diverse, creative collection of images different from the main image.

Take the time to add some of these to each post. You should have a space on your page for posting images, links, videos, audio files, blog posts, or more. Social media platforms often display your page at the top of the feed, and these images and content will help draw users to your page and get them excited about it. It would be best if you made these posts short and punchy. Add your brand to the network.

You should be posting content regularly to capture your community’s attention. Use your cover photos or profile pictures as visual content to tell your story. Showcase your unique personality with a unique cover photo or a different profile photo every few weeks. Do you have a fan page or have a large following on social media?

You may want to start a discussion board on social media to engage with your followers regularly. Include your followers as moderators and add valuable content for them to share with other members of your community. Link to a frequently-viewed blog or article to help drive engagement to your page. Share your favourite products or products that your community has recommended to your audience.

Post During Peak User Hours

Getting traffic to your website from social media is a challenge, no matter which platforms you use. A study from Intuit found that only 18% of people visited a business’ website while they were logged in. So, it’s important to post on social media when your followers are most likely to be online—when they’re checking Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram in between work and home activities.

The simple truth is that tweets, tweets, and more tweets are not working. It’s not easy to use social media for the audience and the business. And that’s the key to writing good social media posts: you can’t think like your audience.

You’ll get the most eyeballs when users are on their laptops, tablets, and phones. Popular times are 9 PM to midnight and 5 to 8 PM. National holidays and weekends are not as active as during workdays. The longer a post is live, the more likes and shares it will receive. So, people are online and active on social media sites during peak user hours (7 AM-12 PM EST and 4 PM-9 PM EST).

More times than not, most of your audience is online at these times, so take advantage of it by posting. Engage with people. The easiest way to start a conversation is by posting a comment. This is called “Chatting,” and it’s been shown to increase interaction with followers. Commenting on a post is also a great way.

The concept of ‘best time to post on social media is still very much relevant. Even with social media algorithms, it’s important to get engagement within the first few hours of posting so that the algorithms will show your posts to more of your audience. And finding the right times to post for your brand can help with that.

The best day to post on Facebook is Wednesday. And the best times are 11 AM and 1 PM. You will get the most consistent engagement on weekdays from 9 AM–3 PM. Social media is becoming increasingly personalized. From being a broadcasting channel, social media is becoming a one-to-one and one-to-few engagement channel.

To provide a personalized experience to your brand’s followers, you need to post according to your audience’s social media usage behaviour. When done right, there’s a higher chance of them seeing and engaging with your social media posts — more reach and more engagement!

If you are taking on a brand new social media profile, don’t worry. You can start with a few informed guesses. Think logically about when your audience might be online and interacting with your social media posts. (Or some of the better studies could be useful.) Here are some possibilities:

Mornings and evenings during commute time,
Lunch and tea break, and
Weekdays for B2B brands and
Weekends for B2C brands.

If you know your target audience and their rough location, you could use that information to strengthen your hypotheses. For example, if you are a local business in Singapore, you might want to focus on times when people in Singapore are awake.

Use Hashtags To Get Found

Without at least one hashtag, social media posts are ghosted posts and can do little to get noticed. Using multiple hashtags also helps brands increase awareness of their post, thereby giving their followers something to do when they visit a brand’s profile.

Share frequently on the same platform Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are all important platforms, and it’s a good idea to share a post to each one at least once every two weeks. For Facebook, posting at least once every two weeks is important.

Hashtags are words, titles or phrases that help send a powerful message. Hashtags can help

categorize posts, increase engagement,
attract followers to a certain niche,
strengthen a brand image and help reach a target audience (and vice versa).

Hashtags turn any word or group of words after the hashtag symbol (#) into a searchable link that users can follow along to find specific types of content and trending topics.

You can use hashtags to cut through the noise on social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. You can also check out how many people use hashtags on Instagram by typing it into the search bar and tapping the Tags section. Click on each tag to see how many posts are using that hashtag, if anyone you follow is using that hashtag, as well as related popular hashtags.

Conclusion

Social media offers many possibilities, from showcasing your brands and interacting with audiences to boosting your brand’s visibility. To use social media effectively, you must consistently engage with your community.

By consistently posting and promoting content that your target audience finds useful, relevant, and engaging, you can build a sizable following that provides a solid foundation of social brand awareness.

Ultimately, successful brands encourage dialogue among their customers and followers, including comments and questions on social media platforms, which allows your brand to be a proactive participant in and a contributor to the online conversations that shape and affect the overall online community.

I trust you enjoyed this article about the Best Tips to Increase Your Social Media Shares. Would you please stay tuned for more articles to come? Take care!

JeannetteZ

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Thoughts? Ideas? Questions? I would love to hear from you. Please leave me your questions, experiences, remarks, and/or suggestions about the Best Tips to Increase Your Social Media Shares in the comments below. You can also contact me by email at Jeannette@WorkFromAnywhereInTheWorld.com.