Make Sure Your Content is Tweetable! #Blogging #SMM #Authors

Blogging: if done right, it’s one of the best ways to attract and retain an audience, and to increase your sales. But to do it right takes a lot of work. Constantly developing fresh content and interacting with your growing audience is a time-consuming and energy-draining project. If you’re an author, you’re probably already drained from the effort you’re expending on your work in progress. So if you’re blogging, too, you want to make sure your posts are optimized to encourage maximum sharing.

This past summer I wrote about being findable on social media. I said, “We all know that social media is one of the best ways to increase your visibility. But simply having a Twitter account, or a blog, or a Facebook page, or all three and more, is wasted effort if you are not making yourself findable.” In this post, I talked broadly about various social media outlets.

Here, I’d like to focus in greater detail on Twitter.

In the battle of the social media platform, Twitter is statistically proven to be one of the most popular. When compared to other media like Facebook and Google+, Twitter is the most prolific method of reaching a widespread audience. In a post on Info Today, Curt Tagtmeier explains that “Twitter has been likened to a giant party where you know no one but wish to make many friends.”

Clearly, if you’re trying to maximize the visibility of the content you create, then Twitter is the fastest and most impactful way to do it. Garrett Moon, writing for CoSchedule, points out that, “In one of the more complete (but not scientific) studies on the value of social sharing buttons, blogger Joshua Benton concludes that many news organizations receive 20% of their Twitter traffic from Tweet buttons available on their page. That’s actually a pretty big deal!”

Why, then, do too many bloggers neglect to include “Tweet This” or “Share on Twitter” buttons?

This was a question that circled back onto my radar as recently as last week. As the social media manager for my son’s local hockey league, I’m responsible for finding and sharing valuable content about youth sports and other sports-related points of interest. Unfortunately, I don’t always get my pre-scheduled tweets up on HootSuite as regularly as I’d like. In between back-to-back games this past weekend, I found myself at the rink, hurriedly looking on my smart phone for something — anything — to tweet about, just to stay current. Yet the first three interesting articles I found did not have tweet buttons!

Yes, I could have gone into my HootSuite app and uploaded the URL that way. Or I could have copied and pasted the link. But that’s a lot of fiddling, and quite frankly, not worth the effort. So it was on to the next for me, until I found an interesting piece that did have a tweet button.

What a missed opportunity for those bloggers. And it’s something that could easily have been avoided. If you’re using WordPress or Blogger, you can set your profile up to include social sharing buttons right at the bottom of the page. You can go directly to Twitter’s button page and, in a few easy clicks, get some simple code to add right into the body of your blog. Or, there are a number of other sites that do the same thing and give you cool graphics to add (I like ClickToTweet the best).

Whatever way you do it, make sure that a share button at least for Twitter is included in your blog posts. You’re working hard to create memorable content. Make sure you maximize your opportunity to be seen by making your posts easily sharable on Twitter.