If you find this article helpful, you should share it with your friends on Twitter and Facebook in return.
Add Social Media Buttons to Your Site
Adding social media buttons is a great way to encourage your audience to share your content with their communities. Of course, you can opt to use a plugin that combines multiple different buttons into one discrete unit, but I find that it doesn’t tend to convert well. The buttons are too small, and users don’t seem to use them much.
Therefore, I would recommend using a button that is branded by the social media service you are planning to use. This way, you can tap into the brand equity created by services like Facebook and Twitter when presenting the share buttons to your users. For instance, when I added the Tweetmeme button to Cherrysave, my retweets skyrocketed relative to using another button. The Tweetmeme WordPress plugin is available so you don’t have to manually paste in the code.
If you are interested in adding buttons for other social media services, you should check out the Facebook share plugin and the StumbleUpon plugin.
Optimize Your Meta Title Tags
Generally, the title of your webpage is pulled from the <title> tags that exists in the <head> portion of the page. Occasionally, though, the title that appears in the browser is not necessarily the title that you want to appear on Facebook when a user shares the page. You can set a separate, unique title for social media purposes with the meta title tag:
<META NAME="Title" CONTENT="Page Title Here">
Sony’s Stop Writing on My Wall campaign did a really good job using the meta title tag to optimize for social media. When you visit the actual site, the title is “SMAA – Social Media Addicts Association.” However, when you share it on Facebook, you get “I joined the Social Media Addicts Association!” Perfect for Facebook.
Encourage Your Readers to Share
Your viewers are most likely to share your site if you tell them to. If you focus on providing very high quality content, there will be a feeling of reciprocity that you can focus by requesting them to click on one of your social media buttons.
