If you create a website with a blog to share, that’s a great place to express your thoughts on topics, opinions on situations, or advice on the best way to get things done. But for many individuals without a blog of their own or business with a blog to share thoughts, sharing other company or personal blog posts give them a way to become part of the conversation.
When a reader finds the information in your website blog worthy of a share, you need to make it as simple as possible for them to pass the information along to their friends, family, and followers. The best way to do this is by adding social media share buttons to your site.
Here are some of the biggest benefits to including social media share buttons on your site.
Increase Post Exposure
As we already touched on slightly, if you want your readers to share your posts, you need to make it easy for them. Readers without much to gain from sharing your post on social media might find that it isn’t worth the effort to log on to their social media profile and draft a post of their own containing your content.
With the implementation of a social media share button onto your page, all the reader needs to do is click “share” for the social media platform of their choosing and up pops a pre-written post about the content. From there, they just need to customize the post to their choosing and share the link with their followers.
When an individual shares one of your posts, your company and content is getting introduced to an entirely new group of people. It is very unlikely that each of your reader’s followers has visited your blog before, and while they may not find the same value in the post as the original reader, they may find something they like elsewhere on your blog. Continuous sharing with a fresh social media market can get you new readers for your blog and new business prospects for your products or services.
Grow Your Link Network
When a reader shares your post on social media, they are creating a link to your blog post and to your website. As your number of social shares continues to grow, so does your number of naturally occurring back links.
Back links are pretty important encouraging your SEO strategy and when Google sees that your blogs have been popular around social media pages, it will boost your page up in results. Google likes to promote websites with a strong following and those that people believe to provide reliable information, so you want as many back links as possible.
Just be careful not to get caught in bots tweeting your posts. While it may seem like Google can’t tell the difference, Google knows all. It is possible for Google to catch on to back links that aren’t genuine, which would hurt your SEO.
Grow Your Traffic
Your traffic will go hand in hand with the amount of exposure your posts and website are receiving. So, when you get your posts in front of social media pages that haven’t viewed your page or posts before, you’re likely to see a boost in traffic to your page.
To grow your traffic even more, create posts that grab attention. If the content inside your post is great, but your headline is lacking, even if someone shares the post on their social media, a poorly written headline isn’t going to get many clicks.
Create blog posts that are great from all angles and your shares and traffic will shoot up.
Free Advertising
When someone chooses to share one of your blog posts, they are essentially promoting your product or services to their network. As any good marketer knows, the power of word of mouth or product recommendations cannot be beat when it comes to acquiring new customers or clients.
So when a reader clicks one of the buttons to share on a blog on social media, they are telling their group of followers that they agree with your service, your ideas, and that you are a reputable brand. If one of the original reader’s followers clicks through to your page and finds that they need your products or services, they are likely to use your company to fulfill their needs.
The best part about this transaction is it didn’t cost you any money to receive. All you needed to do was create expert, unique content that the original reader found worth sharing. The reader did the rest of the work.
When it comes to putting a social media button on your site, it is extremely important for growing your followers, readers, traffic, and audience. Even with this understanding, you have more than a few options of where to place your social media share buttons. The best place to include these option buttons is at the top and bottom of a post, or along the side of the screen on a slider that follows the reader down the page.
The placement of your social media buttons may seem like a minor detail, but again, they are there to make sharing as easy as possible for the reader. If you have a particularly long post, the reader may not want to scroll all the way back up the page to find the share option. Keeping a link at the bottom of the page for the reader to use when they are finished is a great way to increase your number of shares.
Allowing your readers to share your social media posts is a great way to increase the individuals that come to your blog. If you consistently provide great content, interesting and attention grabbing headlines, and a unique perspective and response to information your followers want to know, you should have no trouble gaining a following. But with the help of your followers and fans, adding a button to share your blog on social media can make your business even better.