Amplifying Your Content's Reach With Social Media
There's no better feeling than your hard work being recognized and, for content creators, that means page views, shares and obtaining a top spot on Google. But how, exactly, do you do that?
You have to be where the people are, and you have to engage. You have to listen to your audience and respond to them because you don't engage anyone in monotonous monologues. Your audience will tell you what type of content they like and what time they like to view content.
Social media is crucial to amplifying the reach of your content because of the sheer number of people that utilize it every day. There's no other platform where this amount of people congregate. But, as most marketers know, merely posting something is not enough. Here are some tips and tools to make sure your content gets noticed.
The Length Of Your Post Matters
Joe Bunting suggests aiming for a particular article length to get the results you want to realize. Shorter posts are great for generating more comments while mid-length posts are better for gaining more shares. Longer, well-researched posts are best for ranking well on search engines.
As you can see, the top three results on search engines have an average of about 2450 words.
Typically, blog posts with 600 to 1,600 words will get the most shares on social media; however, if you want to get a blend of search engine authority and social media hits, try moving towards the lengthier side of this spectrum.
Medium's Mike Sall found that “7-minute posts capture the most total reading time on average.” This is about 1,600 words or less if your content is media heavy. But, notice that although 7 minutes has peak performance, the variance becomes greater the longer the article. Keep this in mind. Longer posts are ideal if you believe your users will enjoy it, but shorter posts will retain the majority of your audience's attention. Remember that these rules aren't set in stone—some short posts are great at getting shares. What's most important is to make sure you've accomplished what you wanted to achieve. You always want to take advantage of all your social media platforms to publicize the content that you produce. Thankfully, Twitter (see Tweetdeck) and Facebook both allow you to schedule posts without using third-party apps.
Even the length of your tweets matter. Twitter found that promoted tweets with less than 100 characters had on average 18% more engagement. When marketing to businesses on Linkedin, Buffer suggests posts between 16 to 25 words, with 21 to 25 words getting the most shares. Facebook does even better with short posts. One study of retail brands found that posts with 80 or fewer characters received 66% higher engagement. Although, another study suggested that posts between 100 to 119 characters seemed to be the sweet spot for engagement.
Make Your Social Content More Engaging
There are a lot of ways to make your posts more engaging and lure people to your content. You can ask questions, quote a relevant source, reference a statistic from your article or include an infographic.
These statistics illustrate how some of Twitter's features affected aspects of engagement for verified Twitter users. Photos average a 35% boost in Retweets
Videos get a 28% boost
Quotes get a 19% boost in Retweets
Including a number receives a 17% bump in Retweets
Hashtags receive a 16% boost
You probably haven't thought about this, but where you put a link to your tweet matters! Dan Zarrella's research illustrates that links about 25% into a tweet have the high highest click through rate. Timing is everything
As Jerad mentioned in a previous post, posting at the right time is vital. Think about where your content consumers will be when they see your post. Facebook and Twitter posts may be better in the morning and at the end of the workday, as people are arriving home from work. Linkedin posts are seen more during the middle of the day since Linkedin is more acceptable to use at work.
After every post, you want to go and review the breakdown of how your posts were viewed overtime. You should record your results since every business has a unique audience. Also, use Twitter Analytics. It's free and does everything a beginner needs. For Reddit, I suggest using RedditLater because, besides having the ability to schedule a post, it also suggests the best time to post on a subreddit.
Tools
Copromote is a free reciprocal co-promotion platform that allows you to easily double, triple or quadruple the reach of your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Vine or Youtube. Best of all, Copromote helps your post get those initial retweets which makes your content appear to be more shareable, thus increasing your content's organic reach in the future. Titles are paramount
You want to be clear about the value a viewer will receive while also enticing them to click on your post. To start, you can use Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator in conjunction with Coschedule's Headline Analyzer to get an idea of how captivating your title is and tweak it to improve your title's score. Social sharing buttons make it easy for readers and consumers of your content to share it. Most viewers don't want to go through the extra step to share your post even if it's great. So, you have to do half the work for them. The tools are out there and most of them are free. If you are using WordPress, you can use the AddToAny plugin. There's also ShareThis, AddThis, andShareButtons to make sharing simple. Getting subscribers and leads is one of the main reasons businesses publish content. Getting subscribers also helps you push content to people who generally enjoy it. Leadin is a free plugin made by Hubspot that lets you track visitors, see what content they like and what makes them convert into leads. The plugin integrates with several content management systems, lead capture forms and marketing tools like MailChimp. Leadin will enable you to efficiently listen to your visitors and gather emails of people who might share your content.
Getting That Extra Push
Social media platforms constantly rework their algorithms to make sure businesses don't get a free ride, so take advantage of these tools. To get more shares, likes and upvotes, ask for help from your five best friends, whether they be coworkers, relatives or anyone else who is willing to help you share your content. These tactics can be extremely useful! Reddit's small niche communities are perfect for targeting relevant groups, and it is easy to get to the front page of those small subreddits if you have your five best friends upvote your post. Now that you've learned all these great tips and tricks, put them into action and amplify the reach of your content on social media!
