Ok so you’ve written the perfect blog post. You did tons a research, gathered great data and put a lot of time into crafting this masterpiece of a blog for your website. You hit that magical “Publish” button and it’s sent off into the Internet for all to world to enjoy. And now your job is done, right? WRONG! You have to post it on social media of course – the single most cost-effective way to put your content in front of interested readers. But wait, have you thought about what your post may look like when you share it on social? Will it make people want to stop scrolling and physically click on your post? Before you hit publish on your new blog article make sure you’re keeping these tips in mind so once you’re ready to hit publish on your site, your post is also ready to make its debut on social media.

Write read-worthy content

Yeah, yeah this is sort of a throw away tip for most people. But in reality, if you think about it sometimes you can lose sight about what the purpose of a particular blog really should be. Sometimes in the SEO world, people get lost in the SEO-ization of a blog and that particular post will come out boring and robotic and not at all worth a read to most people. When you’re writing a blog think to yourself “would I want to read this?” and if your answer is no, people on social media likely wouldn’t want to read it either. It’s important to both be informative/technical and to write naturally at the same time in order to reach peak content value.

Create “thumb-stopping” titles

With SO much content and SO many people producing content it’s really hard to catch the eye of someone when you’re sharing your posts on social media. One way you could potentially pull in a reader is by creating a “thumb-stopping” post headline.

The blog post headline is of utter importance for social media sharing. A good SEO title may not make a good social media title and vice versa to it’s important to try and find some good middle ground. OR, if you don’t care about SEO and just want some great engagement on social media go all out with a title you know someone can’t ignore. “How to Make Onion Rings” is an ok blog post title but it isn’t going to stand out and tempt your fingertips to click. But maybe something like “The One ONION Ring Recipe to Rule Them All” would make a user think for a moment. Maybe they’re curious about what technique you’re talking about. Or maybe they’re just curious about the reference to Lord of the Rings. Whatever the case, the point is to make them stop for just a moment to check out what you’ve posted.

Choose high quality and un-boring images

Finding the correct blog header image is extremely important. Even more so now because Facebook, in an effort to clamp down on fake news, does not allow you to choose a different image on your social media post other than the one that is on your blog post. So, it’s important to choose a post image that will look good on both the actual post itself and within social media feeds. And all social media channels put a large emphasis on imagery so this is where you can REALLY catch the eye of a potential reader. Brightly colored and soft-lit images receive the highest click through rate of any other type of image on social media. You can call it the Instagram-ization of social media. To go along with that try not to put any text in a post image, or at least a very minimal amount. It detracts from the image itself and is overwhelming to users.

Make sure your post metadata is in ship-shape

Much like traditional SEO, having appropriate metadata is of utter importance. When you share a blog post on social media, that social network is going to pull some relevant information from the post and display it to users. Those being blog title, post description, and images. This is your opportunity to decide what you want these to be. Otherwise, each individual social channel will decide on its own (and sometimes to frustrating degrees) what to display. It usually includes the first couple of lines of a post or a random stray image somewhere else on your site. So, make sure all of these are set up on each post. You can use free tools like Yoast SEO which will allow you to do this on a post by post basis.

Prominently display your social media sharing options

This one is more of an overall blog tip you should keep in mind. With how fast paced the internet has become it’s important to make things easier for users. And one action that is important for blogs in particular is the organic sharing of them by readers. One way to make sharing posts easier for users is by prominently displaying share buttons on each post. Make sure they are large enough and colorful enough so they can’t be missed. Sometimes placing them both at the top and bottom of a post works well. Or even on the side of the post and having them move with the scroll. Whatever you decide to do to make your sharing options stand out will be beneficial for users.

Sharing is caring

Social media is firmly entrenched in our daily lives. The amount of content being pumped out into these social channels far outnumbers the amount of people there are to consume said content. So, it’s vitally important for you to take every advantage you can in order for your content to stand out above the rest. It’s not always easy to do this and it’s even hard to experienced content creators to do. It causes major headaches for a lot of writers. But, luckily for you it’s something we can take off of your plate so you can completely bypass that unnecessary task. You can learn more about our content creation process and how it can benefit your business but if you think you’re ready to take the dive in yourself, you’re now armed with a bevy of information to use in your next blog posting endeavor.