Encouraging your website visitors to share your content on social media is one of the most effective ways to increase your reach and improve your company’s social media presence.

Most businesses provide share and follow buttons on their website. But not everyone gets the desired results. Simply adding social media buttons on your website is not enough. You must do more and integrate social media on your website in a way that boosts sharing and helps you to realise the full potential of social media for your business.

Why Is It Important For Your Business?

Businesses that are successful on social media use several tactics to boost sharing on their website. The more your website content is shared, the more exposure you will receive on social media.

As users share your content on social media, your content gets more coverage and reaches a wider audience. It is a great way to acquire new followers on social networks used by your business.

Increasing sharing on your website keeps users engaged and result in more referral traffic to your website. It is a great way to improve the overall exposure for your brand on social media.

Here are 10 effective strategies to increase social sharing on your website.

1. Try Limiting Your Social Sharing Options

Giving readers a choice of content sharing options is important but offering too many choices can have a negative effect. Removing some of the options may seem counterproductive at first but it can actually help improve results. It lets you focus more on the social networks that provide the best result for your business. Limiting the number of sharing options to 4 or 5 can in fact boost conversion rates for these networks.

Here is how limiting the number of share options on your website can help:

• Too many buttons can slow down your page loading time
• Too many options can affect decision making
• Fewer options let you provide more focus to the main networks that work best

However, every website is different so  it is worth testing your results to see what works best on your site.

2. Display Share Count

Many businesses are already active on social media. If you have worked hard to gain shares or to build a following on social networks, you can benefit by displaying your stats on your website. On many websites, simple social media buttons are being replaced by share count widgets that display the number of shares on respective social networks e.g. tweetmeme, Digg counter, Facebook share count and more.

This can boost sharing by motivating others to do the same.

It is very easy to add share counts to your buttons. You can obtain a simple piece of JavaScript from respective social media service or use one of the many free third-party services.

3. Use Custom Buttons

A majority of businesses use the default social media buttons. While there is nothing wrong with this, you may wish to try out variations in both, design and size, to gauge the impact on your conversions.

Every website is different and caters to a different audience so the results may not be consistent across all sites. When experimenting with design, it is important to monitor your results to find out what works best.

4. Add a Pin It Button to Your Images

Pinterest is the fastest growing social network that has been creating a buzz on the Internet ever since it was launched. Businesses that are doing well on social media have been quick to incorporate Pinterest into their social strategy.

Initial reports show that Pinterest provides better quality of traffic and outperforms other social networks in many areas. Pinterest is still relatively new among businesses so there is still time for you to benefit as an early adopted.

At the very least, create a free business page on Pinterest, add “Pin It” button on your website content, and display a button to follow your brand on Pinterest.

5. Use Google Analytics “Content Experiments” To Test Alternatives

Google Analytics now offers a new feature called “Content Experiments” which allows you to test how well different versions of your pages or elements within your page work in getting your visitors to accomplish specific goals. You can test up to five variations of a page to see which of those drives the most conversions.

This feature is designed specifically to boost conversions and acquire more leads on your website. It can be used to test the performance of various aspects of your website including different variations and placement of share/follow buttons on your web page.

You are bound to find that a particular style of button or position on the web page that converts better than your current buttons. This is a very effective way to boost conversions and increase sharing on your website.

6. Leverage Facebook’s Open Graph Platform

To get better social interaction from your audience on your website, you will need to look beyond the usual Like Box or Twitter Activity stream on your website. You must do more to engage with your audience and form deeper loyal relationships.

You can take advantage of Facebook’s Open Graph platform to improve the onsite social experience and create personalised experiences for your visitors. According to Facebook, companies that have integrated with Open Graph have seen significant increases in user interaction and engagement.

With this platform, you can create a customised app that runs on your website and becomes a part of a person’s identity and social graph. As website visitors engage with your app, social activities are published to Facebook and a persistent connection is created between the user and your brand. It integrates your brand into key points of distribution on Facebook such as Timeline, News Feed, Ticker and App Tabs.

7. Incentivise Sharing

Businesses can  incentivise sharing to influence the social participation from website visitors. The concept is simple and involves rewarding customers for behavior,  in this case for sharing your content. This is simply an extension of a very old marketing tactic already employed by retailers worldwide.

There are many free services such as Cloudflood that you use to create a share button to put on your website, and the customer has to click that and share on Facebook or Twitter in order to unlock some free content. This is one the simplest examples of how you can incentivise sharing on your website. The possibilities are endless.

8. Use Good Call to Action

Call to action is not only effective for generating leads for your business but can be equally effective for obtaining more shares for your content or attracting more followers on social media. There are many ways to integrate call-to-action to encourage sharing. A common technique is to explicitly ask readers to share your content at the end of your blog posts or articles. Studies show that explicitly asking users to share your content makes it four times more likely to be shared.

9. Create Compelling Headlines That Grab The Attention Of User

This is a well known technique to encourage users to read your content. Attention grabbing headlines are also very effective for obtaining more shares for your content. Compelling headline helps to pique the interest of readers and entices them to share it with others on social media. However, make sure your titles are relevant. Try not to mislead users as  this can be detrimental for your brand.

10. Publish Quality Content Frequently

And last but not the least, you will ultimately need to focus most on adding quality and relevant content on your website regularly. The more relevant your content is for your audience the more it will be shared. This is what will ultimately compel readers to share your content.  For best results, create a variety of popular content types e.g. articles, images, videos and infographics.

Focus on information that helps others solves a problem as 36% of those interviewed in the AOL/Nielsen research shared information they believed would help others.

Conclusion

Social media is  a very effective channel for promoting your website content. But simply displaying social media buttons on your website is not enough to get good results. Your business can employ the tactics above to increase sharing on website and improve your reach.

What About You?

What methods do you use to encourage your website visitors to share content on social media? Are you taking advantage of the strategies above? Please share your responses by leaving a comment below.