Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media platform one thing is true: social sharing matters!

Social sharing creates awareness of your brand, increases ROI and multiplies your fan base. So let’s improve your bottom line with the ultimate guide to more social media shares.

1. Fix Your WordPress Sharing

Before we begin to explore the best ways to get more social shares you need to check out your own website.

The ultimate aim of your WordPress blog should be to engage readers and persuade them to buy your product or service. When people love your content, they will want to share it. It’s YOUR job to make that sharing as easy as possible.

You need to have your social media “follow” icons static on all pages plus a set of social media sharing icons on each blog post. There are plenty of styles available but the most important thing is that they are there and working.

Best Tool: WP Social Sharing is fully responsive, easy-to-install and maintain, and customizable for the look of your site.

2. Know Your Target Demographic

Great marketers know their target demographic and target their social media sharing and content towards that individual.

Google Analytics provides a whole bunch of information about your Web visitors in the “Audience” tab. Learn the following about your visitors:

• Age
• Gender
• Language
• Country
• Interests
• What device they use to see your site

Knowing this information can guide you in your choice of voice, content and imagery towards your target market. The more you relate your content to your market, the more you’re apt to get juicy social media shares!

Here’s a snippet from “Audiences” filtered by country. When analyzing the “bounce rate,” it’s clear that countries with predominately English speakers spend less time on this Website than visitors from mostly Spanish-speaking countries. Either the Spanish content rocks or the English content needs to improve to keep English speakers hanging around long enough to like the content and share it!

Best Tool: Once you’ve used Google Analytics, head over to your free Facebook Insights panel and select “People.” There you will get some great insights about your page fans. See how these compare to your Google Analytics and plan your juicy, soon-to-be-massively-shareable content accordingly.

3. Know What’s Trending

There’s not much point in posting about your new product if a highly significant piece of industry news is trending. So why not get a better sense of trending topics so that you can make your blog or Website content relate to one of those themes?

There are free trending tools available on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so you should check these out before you post. You can also create an API(application programming interface) for yourself to help you in the process. To do so you can contact services that provide it like IBM API management and similar others and seek their help in creating and managing APIs. This seems like a long process but don’t worry: You don’t need to stare at a computer screen all day to figure out what’s trending anymore. When you’re in line to pick up your latte or on public transport, get on Facebook and tap on the search field:

And do the same on Twitter:

They’re practically begging you to discover what’s hot.

Best Tool: Remember that to get the best out of this tool you should be aware of your demographic region and search what is trending there as I have done in the below Google Trends search for UK. Google Trends is a great free tool that shows you what’s hot in a given city or country.

4. Sharpen Your Headlines

If your headlines don’t grab people then it will be difficult to get social shares on your content. This applies to your blog and social media posts. If you want your blog post to be suitable for social media sharing then don’t exceed 116 characters.

Here’s a few tips for sharpening up your headlines:

• Headlines with 81- 100 characters generate the most shares.
• Headlines featuring the word “photo(s)” performed 59% better than headlines without that word.
• Try this formula: Number or Trigger word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise.
• The ideal length for a Facebook update is just 40 characters.

Best Tool: A headline analyzer tool like the one from ShareThrough analyzes the SEO (search engine optimization) value and sharability of your post. Here’s one I made earlier!

5. Smarten Up Your Images and Videos

Today social media users have a short attention span of around eight seconds which doesn’t give you very long to interest them with your blog post or social media update let alone get them to share it! This is why high quality images and videos are important for your social media updates and you should take the time to create good ones.

• Researchers found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.
• Infographics are liked and shared on social media 3x more than other any other type of content.
• 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
• Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65%.

Stats source

Best Tool: First you need to make sure you are using high quality licensed stock images like these ones I have detailed here. Next you should use a site like Canva to help you layout your text and images in a professional way. Canva also helps you to resize your images for your social media channels so they display correctly. Need an easy way to create videos for your social media channels? Check out Unsplash.

6. Post During Peak User Hours

If you want to give yourself the best chance possible for social shares and engagement you will need to post during peak user hours even if they are not your own peak user hours! If you are posting at 10am GMT but your target audience is in EST then they will be missing your posts completely!

Best Tool: The social media management tool Agorapulse shows me the days and times where my posts get the most reach and engagement. This helps me plan when I post.

Then I move to the “Publishing” tab to begin scheduling my posts across my social networks. Using the easy content calendar I can choose any date or time zone to post my content meaning no late nights and no working on Christmas Day!

This works for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (although the Instagram API doesn’t allow direct publishing – it takes an extra click), LinkedIn, and Google+.

7. Tap Into Influencer Marketing

35% of social media professionals say they have a mature influencer relationship program and when it comes to social media sharing it’s certainly something you should be doing. Influencers with thousands of followers can help to amplify your content far further than your existing fan base and the best things of all is that it’s free! Here are a few tips to garner more social media shares from influencers.

• Identify influencers within your niche
• Start retweeting / sharing their updates
• Credit and hyperlink their work in your posts
• Avoid spam/sales talk

Best Tool: Klout helps me identify influencers within my niche and measures my own performance for the keywords I am interested in.

8. Get Boosting

Sponsoring your tweets, posts and pins is a great way to promote your message, gain more exposure and increase your social shares. A sponsorship can cost from $2 and may be targeted according to your region, audience demographic and industry sector.

• 75% of brands boost their Facebook posts
• 88% of Twitter revenue comes from promoted tweets
• Adding a Call To Action button before you boost doubles your social shares
• Promoted tweets with videos or GIFs get 300%+ more engagement
• Hashtags on promoted tweets get 122% higher engagement rates than those without

Best Tool: Using the native Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest ad platforms are totally free. (You just have to pay for the ads themselves.) They make it easy to create sponsored posts. If you’re interested in capturing the comments on these ads on Facebook and Instagram, then use a social media management tool like Agorapulse.

We hope you enjoyed reading our ultimate guide to more social media shares. Statistics show that if you ask for shares you will be blessed with shares so if you loved this article remember to share it!