Image Credit Momentus Media ~ Click Image to read Why Do People Share?
No matter how many – or currently how few – supporters your business, blog or cause has, it is up to you to facilitate their ability to support you.
One of the best ways to do that is to post regularly to a blog and make your posts easy to share by:
Providing the most commonly used share buttons on each post. Consider offering Twitter, Facebook (share and/or like), StumbleUpon, Google + and any others specific to your niche.
Creating an RSS feed and place it in an easy to find location – ideally the top right corner near the header of your site – so that social media savvy influencers can auto-feed your new content.
Sharing buttons should be on each post but NOT appear on the summaries on your home page where they reduce load time. This is controlled by where you place the code. Alternatively you can use floating share buttons on the edges.
Be sure your canned tweets include your Twitter username, compelling text to encourage clicks, and that they are less than 140 total characters. Too little text, tweets that won’t work because they are too long, and not including your Twitter username are common mistakes.
Table of contents
VIDEOS:
If you publish regular videos, you can use those as the basis of your posts. Add some descriptive introductory and closing text and you have a compelling post Google, will be more likely to rank well and that your supporters will be happy to send to their friends and family and spread across social networks for you.
TWITTER:
IMHO, Twitter is your most important account because it is where influencers or influencers collaborate. If you have a blog or Web site you REALLY need a Twitter account and you need to put your Twitter username in an easy to find location (as text so it can be found on a search of your page).
See my complete Twitter Best Practices post for details on how to get the most out of Twitter.
FACEBOOK:
Facebook is necessary because it is where the masses share with their closest friends and family which are the people with whom they have the most influence. For advice on Facebook visit these blogs:
Blogs with Facebook sections: (Facebook experts)
@AskKim (see Facebook under Social Media Secrets).
Google Plus Will Own the Future of Business Collaboration
STUMBLEUPON:
People like me know how to review your content on StumbleUpon which can send hundreds and sometimes thousands or even tens of thousands of visitors and is an excellent social network for saving research.
While it is NOT obvious, there are pages on StumbleUpon identifying experts and top content. Use this syntax to find them:
By Keyword Phrase: http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/KEYWORD-PHRASE/ – for example:
Blogging Tips go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/blogging-tips/
Local Search go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/local-search/
On a results page, click on MORE in the upper section to see users who have shared the best and most content on a topic.
The lower section shows the top content tagged for that keyword phrase.
By Topic Expert: http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/KEYWORD-PHRASE/people/
Use this syntax to go directly to the people section. There can be multiple pages of people who have shared top or quantities of content on that topic.
For example, use http://www.stumbleupon.com/discover/social-media/people/ to see people who share content about social media
Social Media savvy bloggers use browser addons and sharing tools like the su.pr toolbar, Facebook Bookmarklet and FriendFeed bookmarklet but you should NOT expect most users to know about these.
Make it fast and easy for them to share and they will. Don’t and they won’t. It is that simple!
One more tip. Intentionally include Twitter length ‘sound bites’ in your content. Whenever I come across content that makes multiple excellent points that can easily be tweeted I schedule a tweet for each one.
Instead of me sharing your content once on StumbleUpon, Facebook, FriendFeed and Twitter, compelling Twitter-length points could get your content tweeted two, three or even 10-12 times.
I have come across content so compelling I have scheduled a dozen tweets over several days. Each of my tweets averages roughly 130 clicks so that adds up. And there are many more influencers with vastly more followers than me.
After I published this post today an example of what I mean occurred:
One of my scheduled sound bite tweets went viral
because @TonyRobbins RTed it.
This happened because @AdamToporek’s post about Google Plus Privacy featured those perfectly tweetable sound-bites I mentioned!
This is what can happen. That post already has 395 retweets which is bound to continue higher as you can see at this Topsy Retweet Measuring link.
The last time this happened to me, @TonyRobbins RTed a guest post on GrowMap. That post went viral and ended up with 395 RTs and 3,719 page views according to Google Analytics.
If you know the above advice will benefit you, do NOT let yourself get stuck. If you do, ask for assistance in the comments here or by tweeting @GrowMap. We or our collaborators are here to answer your questions and share HOW to make the above happen.
STUMBLEUPON:
One more tip. Intentionally include Twitter length ‘sound bites’ in your content. Whenever I come across content that makes multiple excellent points that can easily be tweeted I schedule a tweet for each one.