In this installment of our 8 Best Practices for Optimizing Your Social Media series, we’ve gathered the most effective ways to ensure your content is easily shared online. While some of this may seem obvious, it’s surprising how often people forget to put them into practice.
1. Place share buttons next to the specific content you want to be shared (e.g. a video, an image or the top of a blog article). We often find general share buttons are placed in footers or headers, disconnected from the actual content and linking only to a homepage. In these cases, readers are less likely to share content from the site over time since they would be sharing the same link again and again.
2. Make sure to auto-fill Tweet sharing boxes with your @name to ensure attribution of your content and to motivate mentions.
3. Add Open Graph tags to your website. Open Graph (or “OG”) tags are meta tags that help Facebook, SocialFlow and other websites understand your content and make it easy to include this information when sharing on social networks.
Basic OG tags include:
- og.title
- og:description
- og:image
- og:site_name
For more information on OG tags, check out http://ogp.me/
Come back for next week’s topic: Meeting Your Audience Halfway
To read more and catch up, here is a look back on Series #1
