How To Encourage Website Visitors to Share Your Content

Getting website visitors to share your content is a natural and great way of spreading your content and gaining more website visitors. It is a marketing method that is free (unless you use paid plugins etc.) and very effective as the sharer is trusted by its followers and friends.

Consumers are 92% more likely to trust their peers over advertising when it comes to purchasing decisions and a similar principle goes for visiting a website.

Encourage Website Visitors to share your content

Getting visitors to share your website content really boils down to creating content that people enjoy interacting with.

Getting people to share your content is all about providing value to the visitor. It might sound cliché because it’s being said all around the web but that’s the truth!

Providing value with your website content doesn’t necessarily have to mean that you provide the visitors with “real” value such as gifts or even cash. It means that the visitor should feel that they’re getting something from your website such as helpful information or even just a good laugh.

The most common ways to give value with your website is to make it educational, informative or entertaining but there are of course other ways you can provide value to the visitor with as well.

 If your content is providing genuine value, a lot of people will share it since social sharing is not that difficult. So whatever you do, make sure you are providing value with your content that is accurately targeting your audience because that will take you a long way.

The trick is to try to focus your content in those directions, and this entirely depends on your industry content. A cursory search online will produce plenty of articles discussing the “Most Shared Types of Content”. Locate these articles and try to steer your content this way.

Have in mind

Creating shareable content, is a trick that can only be mastered through time, trial and error and the correct tracking and analyzation of stats. But once mastered, it can become second nature.

Good content typically means good ideas, conveyed simply and straightforwardly with a picture or two as appropriate. You should also make sure that your content is edited because spelling and grammar errors can scare people away from sharing your content.

A tip is to reserve some content for the ones sharing your content to access after they’ve shared something from you.

But first..

Before you can get people to share your content, you must have visitors who can share your content. There’s no going around that. The more visitors you have, the more people will share your content.

Because if no-one sees your content, there is no chance for them to share it.

Some quick ways you can begin getting some traction is to simply share your content yourself.

Share it on your social media platforms or even tell people about your website face-to-face.

Paid marketing

As mentioned, an important part of getting your content shared is actually having people who can share your content. This means website visitors.

If it’s possible for you, a good way to start getting some website visitors is by paying for it. A very effective source for website marketing is pay-per-click ads, for example on Google.

Ask people to share your content

Ask and you shall receive a wise man once said.

Sometimes people need a direct request before they share your content so add something like “Share with your family and friends so they don’t miss this great……” on your post to increase the chances of getting your content shared.

Now, this won’t work every time but it should be able to increase the social shares of your content a tiny bit.

Things to think about

Firstly, it helps to know what your purpose or goal is with having your content shared.

Is it more traffic, conversions, emails, links etc?

Secondly, do you know what kind of related content is already being shared?

Producing sharable content is not a quick process. You have to do your research, have creative resources available and the expertise to package it all in a way that is beyond just ‘engaging’.

What about you?

You can learn a bit about how people act when it comes to sharing by simply asking yourself.

What was the last content that you shared? Or that someone you know shared with you? Why was it shared?

Is your existing content being read? How is your analytics? Is your audience increasing? Static? Existent?

Do you have solid graphics/video capabilities?

Is your branding synchronized across all of your channels?

AND…

What do you have in place downstream for all of the new visitors that are visiting you for the first time when your content gets traction?

An initial (and probably obvious answer) is to add a strong CTA (Call To Action) telling them to share the article (as discussed previously). A big bright button or something similar. Strong CTA:s have a lot to do with the design, so take a moment to think about how you can make your share buttons more appealing.

You can also entice your visitors with a contest. Something like “Share this article and you’ll be automatically entered to win ___. Contests are usually very successful because everyone loves free stuff and if at the same time it’s easy to enter, more people will do it.

Be unique

Articles or any type of website content is shared by the visitors because it’s something that the reader has not found anywhere else and it’s something the reader wants to give to their peers.

So, that means that whatever content you decide to create and want to be shared,  you must bring something new and unique to the table that’s fresh and worthwhile.

Make your content easily sharable

If you want people to share your content, you need to make it easy to do so.

Very few people want to spend several minutes sharing content from your site, it should only demand seconds.

Therefore, making it easy for your visitors to share your content should be highly prioritized.

You might have seen that a lot of blogs have taken this very seriously. These sites are pre-writing social media posts for you so the only thing you need to do is press share.

ClicktoTweet  is a tool where you can pre-write Twitter captions for the people sharing your website content.

A tip is to also implement the Open Graph protocol and Twitter Cards etc (there are a ton of share plugins out there that can help make the sharing experience better on your site).

Make sure that when the visitor decides to share your content, they get a nice, proper preview of whatever they’re sharing. That means if they share it by pasting in the URL to Twitter, for example, they get the same benefits as hitting your “share” button.

Be careful though.

Don’t include messages like “I just read this amazing article from (your website) check it out!” in their post.

It then gets very clear that the person sharing it hasn’t written the caption and often, it can turn people off.

Make the caption fun and avoid promotive captions. Too promotive captions can backlash and harm your website.

No one likes to read a social media post which looks like the subject of a spam email.

Whatever you do, avoid click bait captions.

Don’t saturate, though!

Don’t saturate your page with a bunch of sharing icons and pop-ups.

This can ruin the whole visitor experience so think about that when you’re implementing your share CTA:s.

Conclusion

Getting your content shared by your website visitors to share your content is an art. You have to constantly adjust and analyze your sharing CTA:s in order to get the best results.

Use plugins to make the sharing experience better but avoid spam.

If you like this article, don’t forget to share it with your friends!;)