How to Maximize the Sharing of a Blog Post: Part 1

by Scott - 5 Comments

Receive more articles like this one

If you’ve ever spent 2+ hours slaving over a blog post only to have 1/2 a spam bot be the sole person to share it you may want to read this post.

spambot

Improving the odds of getting people to share your post starts with creating compelling content (or having a lot of money to give entrepreneurs). Assuming you can achieve this, there are certain considerations and practices that maximize the exposure available through social media.

The Sharing Funnel

You can visualize the content sharing funnel by working backwords.

For content to be shared, it needs to be read (unless you have a posse retweet jockeys).

For it to be read, a visitor must perceive that it’s worthy of their attention upon arriving at the post.

For them to arrive at the post, it must be perceived as compelling enough to visit or click through.

Share Your Post
Each point within this sequence contains best practices that can make the difference between a post going viral or your blog looking like an empty restaurant. Let’s start by examining best practices within the different stages.

Sharing

The best way to improve the odds of your content being shared is to make the act of sharing easy. The easier you make it to share something the more likely people are going to do it. Make no mistake, there is an art to making things easy. On my personal blog, I try to achieve this by giving readers an opportunity to share at both the top and bottom of every post (see below).

Top of post:

 

Bottom of post:

There’s a few plugins out there which provide a floating sharebar that follows readers as they scroll through content. I avoid these because I think it takes away from the user experience, but some people seem to like this option.

The Effects of Optics on Sharing

Most people are followers; they feel more comfortable engaging in actions once they’ve seen other people do them first. This phenomenon exists across the social media ecosystem. The bottom line is that people are more likely to share your content when it’s evident that other people have. People behave this way because:

a) the fact that others have shared gives them comfort and permission to do so.

b) they want to be part of a tribe. All the cool kids are sharing!

c) they don’t want to look inconsiderate relative to their peers. “Well Jimmy shared Mikey’s post so I better do it too, or Mikey might like Jimmy better!”

To take advantage of the optics of sharing, the first thing to do is make sure that all of your share buttons have counters on them. This facilitates social proof.

The second and more challenging component is making sure the counters actually have numbers on them which signals to readers that someone else has already shared it. You’ll want these numbers to be as high as possible before a reader is faced with the life-defining question: to share or not to share?


One way to approach this challenge is through audience segmentation. Consistent bloggers have a core audience – these are people they’ve built relationships with and provided enough value to for them to subscribe to their content. Your core audience are the first people you want to expose your content to because they’re most likely to share regardless of whether others have or not. In order to even have the ability to isolate these people, you must have the delivery mechanisms in place to easily push them content. I use the RSS management tool Feedburner to isolate and manage my core audience. Everytime I publish a post, it gets delivered to them immediately through email or their RSS reader.

After I publish the post, I intentionally hold back on sharing it any further in order to give my core audience the first crack at reading and sharing the post. Thirty minutes to an hour will suffice. Again, I do this because they’re most likely to share which provides social proof to additional audiences who may be less likely to share without it.

At this point, it’s time to push your content to the next audience segment: people who’ve opted to connect with or follow you on social networks. This group is still primed to share your content and benefits from the social proof provided by the sharing of your core audience.

Finally, you’ll want to push this content to the third segment which is composed of people that may not be familiar with you at all. Because these audiences are less familiar with you, it can require more social proof for them to even read your content, let alone share it. You can reach this audience by syndicating your content to communities like Reddit, HackerNews, and StumbleUpon. Writers from other publications that you’re trying to get to re-syndicate your content also fall into this bucket.

In the next part of this post, I plan on discussing ways to optimize your content for reading and clicking through – two components vital to maximizing the number of people who share your post.

 

Don’t want to miss part two? Be notified when it’s posted by subscribing via email or following me on Twitter.

Join 19,746 Subscribers