Just a few years ago, search engine optimization was the main focus of website owners. Nowadays, more and more individuals and businesses are recognizing the importance of social media optimization. Social media optimization refers to optimizing a site to share its content on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more. With each passing year, social media plays a more substantial role in rankings for search engines.
If you’re interested in jumping on the social media optimization bandwagon and optimizing a website for social media sharing, here are a few tips to help you do so.
5 Tips to Optimize a Website for Social Media Sharing
1. Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing – Create High-Quality Content
If you can only do one thing to optimize your website for social media sharing, you should create high-quality content.
After all, the better the content’s quality on your website, the more your visitors will want to share your content on social media websites. Investing time and money into creating well-written and relevant content is more than worthwhile. It will make a difference in your analytics.
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2. Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing – Vary Your Content
One of the main challenges that website owners face is attracting the attention of readers and viewers. In 2015, Microsoft conducted a study and found that the average attention span is declining rapidly. In 2000, the average attention span was about 12 seconds. However, in 2015, Microsoft found that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds.
Therefore, it is up to you to vary your content to capture your viewers’ attention.
Not only should you publish articles and blog posts, but you should also publish visuals in the form of data visualizations and infographics. Accompany all of your text-heavy content with high-quality photos and videos. It would be best to offer your readers different ways to consume your content.
For example, consider creating a podcast to accompany the eBook you recently published.
3. Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing – Keep Your Headlines Short and Sweet
A common mistake that website owners make is creating long headlines. Short and sweet headlines are more likely to capture readers’ attention. In some cases, a short headline may generate a sense of imperativeness. This feeling may encourage visitors to read and share the article.
It would help to remember that some social media websites, like Twitter, have character limits. Keeping your articles’ headlines and blog posts brief will give visitors more characters to share your content on social media websites.
Most WordPress SEO plugins have tools to help you write headlines that convert. Rank Math’s Content AI tool can be very helpful with generating headlines.
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4. Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing – Display Social Sharing Buttons Prominently
The last thing you want to do is make it difficult for regular readers and visitors to share your content on social media websites. Under no circumstances should a user have to hunt for a button to share your content on social media.
It would be best to display social sharing buttons prominently on your website.
These buttons should be displayed on your homepage and individual pages for articles and blog posts. Experimenting with different positions and styles for your social sharing buttons would be best. Website owners generally experience more success when they position the social sharing buttons in the website’s header rather than the footer.
5. Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing – Don’t Forget the Importance of Images
Many website owners fail to remember the importance of images when designing their websites and publishing content.
If you aren’t convinced of the importance of images, look at the success of image-sharing social media websites like Pinterest and Instagram. Visual content is the future.
This doesn’t mean that written content is becoming obsolete. Instead, it is becoming more critical to complement quality written content with visual content. You should see positive changes in your analytics if you publish high-quality videos and photography on your website. Even just increasing the pixel width of your photos can lead to more shares and clicks.
It would be best to remember that the photos you select to accompany your written content will show up when the content is shared on LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest. Depending on user settings, the same is also true for Twitter.
Final Thoughts – Optimizing a Website for Social Media Sharing
Optimizing a website for social media sharing is just as important as search engine optimization, local SEO, and website optimization for mobile. Based on the ever-growing popularity of social media websites, the world is becoming increasingly social.
If you’re new to social media optimization, start with the five tips discussed above.
Remember, however, to focus on your website is your business’s central information portal. You do not own your social media accounts and can be “de-platformed” at any time, losing all your followers and work put into that social media channel.
