Five Tips to Make your Blog Content Shareable

As big as your blog audience is, it can always be bigger.

One of the best ways for a post to reach a bigger audience is for it to be shared on social sites – a popular Pin on Pinterest, or a widely shared Facebook update can bring in thousands of new readers to your blog each day.

So how can you start attracting more shares, likes, clicks and pins?

Invest some time in Building your Social Presence

I’m going to preface this tip with: you can’t be everywhere, all the time.

But if you want more likes, shares, pins and the like, you need a presence on those social networks.

Pick two or three networks that feel like the place your audience hangs out and allow yourself an hour or two each week to build up those profiles – travel is a natural fit with Pinterest because it’s so photogenic, and Facebook is also a natural home for great images.

Use Social-Friendly Images

Lots of travel posts include great images, but having one strong lead image that ‘captures’ your post can help to encouraging sharing.

Consider using Photoshop or free sites like Picmonkey to overlay some simple text over your image – you can also add your blog logo, if you have one, so if your image is re-pinned, it’s identifiable as yours.

If you want an image to work well on Pinterest, research suggests the most successful pictures are vertically oriented, use warm colours and focus on scenery and sights, rather than people.

Add a ‘pin it’ overlay to your images to encourage readers hovering over a photo to share it to Pinterest.

Make it Simple to Share

If you’re a WordPress user, then you are spoiled for choice when it comes to sharing plug-ins. I’ve had some success with SumoMe (which lets readers share posts, and Tweet snippets of text from you site) and Shareaholic, but do look around and see what matches well with the look and feel of your site.

Consider plug-ins that generate a pop-up while people are reading, which you can use to prompt them to share as they reach the end of a post.

Also take a look at specific plug-ins for different social networks – Alpine does great image plug-ins for Instagram, and the Facebook Social Plug-in is a nice option for making posts Facebook friendly.

Obvious, but true – don’t forget to Tweet, post, share and pin your own posts – you’ll get more people sharing your update than sharing your post, so you can get great results if you’re consistent in your posting.

Be Personal

If we’ve learned anything from Buzzfeed, it’s that people share content they have an emotional response to – and they’re more likely to share things that give them a positive feeling.

For bloggers, this means sharing happy memories of a trip, heartwarming stories about communities, positive, silver linings about proactive steps taken to protect vulnerable environments – will all tend to be more shareable then more negative posts.

Including your own feelings and responses also helps people to connect with your post, so if you typically share lists of destinations, resources and links, consider adding in some personal experiences, and responses to what you have seen and done.

Ask People to Share

If you post about a trip to New York, tag your hotel, tag the tourism authority, tag the airline – invite and ask people to share your content.

A useful trick can be to organise a loose collective of bloggers and vloggers and agree to share each other’s content – it helps if you have similarly sized audiences in slightly different niches

Customise your Content

It’s tempting to save time and post the same update to Twitter, Facebook, Google, Instagram… and so on. But investing some time in customised updates for different networks can work well.

WordPress offers plug-ins like Jetpack that let you do this fairly easily, and you can also use plug-ins for OpenText, which will let you define the text that appears alongside your post when it’s shared on Facebook. Make sure to sign up for Twitter cards, too, so that you can use nice large images on your Tweets.

Do you have any great tips for boosting your posts’ shareability? We’d love to hear them in the comments!