Written by
Enviral
When you’re a small business, funds can often be limited. It’s not plausible to pay top dollar for a TV ad or an expensive marketing campaign. This is why more and more; businesses need to take advantage of social media in order to reach as many people as possible.
But with it increasingly becoming harder to get your posts shared, how can you incentivise Facebook sharing to help your business flourish?
First and foremost, you have to make sure your social media sharing works on mobile. On average, people spend five hours a day on their phone, often flicking through social media. This means if your content isn’t shareable then you’re missing out. BIG TIME.
Email subscribers can be a great source of potential social media shares. By subscribing to your email they show they’re dedicated to your content, so if you make sharing easy they’re more likely than others to comply. By using tools such as Mailchimp, you can easily add in social media icons within your email, which means your content can be easily shared.
However, you don’t want to overwhelm the reader with ten different platform icons, as research shows they are more likely to be deterred. Instead, choose a few preferred platforms you would like your content circulating on.
The average person on Facebook has 338 friends, therefore a share from just one person means your page can be seen by hundreds of people. While it is unrealistic to think all 338 will like or subscribe. it highly increases your chances of being looked up, and if even a fraction of people like what they see, you get a whole lot more than just one email subscriber.
Facebook does however have some strict rules on asking people to share your page. You can offer entry into a competition for a prize if people like your Facebook page, however you cannot incentivise them to share your page with others by promising them entry into a prize draw. This means you have to think of other creative ways to ask people to share, and the golden rule for this is ensuring you post great content!
Another innovative way to encourage sharing is by setting up sharing when people go to copy text from a post of yours. A drop-down bar can pop up with different social media icons where the reader can share the selected text to, citing your page when they do so.
You get to choose which social media platforms are options for sharing on, thus you can simply offer your preferred platforms, or vary which ones are available to ensure you reach the largest audience possible. This can be done through Po.st which not only supplies the sharing option, it can also be used to record who is sharing your content and how often they do so. This could be helpful in knowing who you are reaching and in evaluating your success rates amongst these groups.
You can even go one step further and set up the option for automatic sharing. This means that as soon as you post, your audience will share it, even if they have not yet gotten round to reading it. Although, this requires a hugely loyal audience who have liked your previous content for a while, or at least enough to agree to automatically share your content before reading it themselves.
While it is extremely important to get your audience to engage and share your content, you can’t rely solely on them. You have to do a lot of the work. Content has to be interesting enough for people to want to share it with peers, and it also has to be easy to share. The more shares, the more exposure for you, so be sure to make it as easy as possible!
By Eliza Wojtas