How To Make Your Content More Social Media Friendly

How To Make Your Content More Social Media Friendly Social media is key for  content marketing success.  Once youve put the work into producing a piece of content, you want it to catch fire and get tons of shares. All you have to do is blast the link across your social channels, and watch all the shares and traffic roll in. Right? Well, that isnt quite how it works. And if your social media content isnt performing, it could be because it isnt very social media friendly. Depending on how you look at it, social media can be a blessing or a curse. Sure, it is a great low cost channel for spreading your content, but it can also be a crippling scapegoat if you arent careful. You could but be publishing on social media regularly with little return on your investment, all with the appearance of doing great content marketing. Are your readers actually  sharing your content?  Are your really achieving the social traction that you expected or deserve? Is the good old hub-and-spoke model of content marketing actually working for you? Fortunately, the problem may be entirely your fault. You may just need to make some basic adjustments to make your content more social media friendly. The more friendly you make your content, after all, the more likely your readers will be to share it with their audience. Here are five easy ways that you can do just that. Want more people to share your content? Make it more social media friendly. 1.  Make Sure Your Content Looks Good On Social Media One of the first things that you need to do is to make sure that your content look good when it is shared on social media. This relies on  Ã‚  a small bit of meta-tag code that should included the HEAD of your html page. This code will provide instructions to networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest by telling them which image, title, and description to use when a post goes live. You can preview what your own link previews look like using this  handy debug tool provided by Facebook. There are several ways to ensure that your link previews always look great. The free  JetPack plugin  or  Yoast SEO plugin  for WordPress will make a "best guess" at what these link previews should include using data from the post itself. This is a good starting point, but may not offer enough flexibility for the power user. Tools like our own allow you to completely  customize your link previews, giving you maximum editing control. Recommended Reading: Best Practices Guide For Making Sure Your Posts Look Good On Social Media 2. Write Emotional Headlines Because They Get  Shared More One of the ways to make your content more social media friendly is to write headlines that are more likely to be shared with others. There are some very simple ways to do this. For example, our research has proved that headlines with more emotional value tend to get shared more with others. With millions of headlines in our system, we went through each one and calculated its  Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) – a rating that attempts to measure the emotional value of a headlines. What we learned was that headlines with a higher emotional value were more likely to be shared on line. The  Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer  Ã‚  is a free tool from  the Advanced Marketing Institute that you can use to calculate the EMV of your own headlines. Can this tool predict shares? Maybe. Simply copy and paste your headline into the box and it will give you a calculated score of your headline’s EMV Score. After researching EMV, we thought a great tool would combine that research with other elements of headlines that drive shares, traffic, and search results. That's why we built the headline analyzer. Try this tool to write even better headlines. Write More Shareable  Headlines With Our Free Headline Analyzer The headline analyzer  will help you: Use headline types that get the most traction for social shares, traffic, and search engine ranking. Make sure you have the right word balance to write readable headlines that command attention. See the best  word and character length for search engines like Google and email subject lines, while also seeing  how your readers will scan your headlines. Try The Free Headline Analyzer Now Recommended  Reading: Proof That Emotional Headlines Get Shared More On Social Media 3.  Make Your Content  Easy To Share By adding simplicity to your page, you can increase the likelihood that someone will share your content, immediately making it more social media friendly. There are few simple things that you can do to make this more likely. Make Sure Your Social Sharing Buttons Are In The Right Spot Not long ago we took at look  at how the placement of social sharing buttons could  best influence social sharing from  our blog layout. What we found was that  the top/left side of the page seemed to perform the  best for most situations.  Because most websites load content on the left side of the page, and based on how people typically look through a site, it is pretty easy to see that the most noticeable place for this type of activity is in the top-left portion of the page.   Recommended Reading: What is the Best Placement for Social Media Buttons? Add Easily Sharable Content To Your Post Here at we made a simple plugin for our own use, and have  recently  made it available to everyone for free. This simple tool allows you to easily add tweetable content to your posts.  Ã‚  These boxes create important triggers that you can use to get your readers sharing content for you. Create beautiful boxes in your blog posts. #ClickToTweet Make Your Images Easy To Share SumoMe makes a great little tool that allows your readers to easily share your blog images via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. It is the best option out there for sharing your visual content across the web. Recommended Reading: 25 Growth Hacks Your Content Marketing Desperately Needs 4. Publish Your Content At The  Right  Time When is the best time to publish a blog post? KISSmetrics in corporation with  Dan Zarrella  has been able to crack the code on this very idea. Key Takeaways: Most blog content is read in the mornings. However, men tend to be more likely to read content in the evenings. Monday is the best day of the week to publish content. Most blog posts gets the most traffic around 11am. Saturday and early morning visitors (9am) tend to leave more comments. Monday and Tuesday are the highest drivers of inbound traffic. The take away on this data is  pretty easy to see. It is likely in your best interest to publish your content early in the week, and early in the morning to maximize your social media  impact.