5 Best Ways to Boost Sharing on Your Site
Over the last few months, we’ve been talking to bloggers and crunching the numbers to discover ways to increase sharing for anyone who owns a website. What we found is that there are a few simple things that you can do (now) to increase sharing on your site.
1. Step Up Your Sharing Buttons
Are you still using the standard sharing buttons provided by the social networks? If so, using AddThis buttons could boost sharing by 22%. Better yet, our Sharing Sidebar can increase performance up to 244%!
Of course, your mileage may vary, so focus on creating interesting, original content that your visitors want to share. (Hint: you’ll know this by looking at what content performed well in your analytics.)
2. Make it Personal
Your site visitors don’t all fit the same mold. So why show all of them the same sharing buttons? AddThis tools customize which sharing buttons display for your visitors to make it more relevant.
This personalization benefits you, too. Personalized sharing buttons increase sharing up to 15% over regular buttons––and every bit helps!
3. Make it Relevant
Speaking of making it personal, you want your visitors to have a relevant experience as well. That’s why we offer Recommended Content widgets that give personalized content recommendations so they’d get hooked on your content. Here’s what one of the content recommendation widgets look like:
4. Know Your Audience
A lot of people put too much effort into optimizing their website for Facebook and Twitter. However, the smart thing to do is look at where your shares are coming from and optimize for those visitors.
Some bloggers that we talked to get 5-10 times as much traffic from Pinterest as Facebook. They tend to take that into account, and make sure they have the big beautiful photos that Pinterest users love.
5. Say Hello!
Did you know that our Welcome Bar can show a custom message to visitors from any social network? That way you can ask them to share your content on the network they just came from.
It sounds so simple, but using the Welcome Bar to customize your message asking your visitors to share your content can be more effective than sharing buttons alone––approximately 147% more effective.
Bonus Tip:
To easily activate mobile-friendly sharing, following and content recommendation tools for your website (like the one in #3), upgrade to AddThis Pro or activate your tools today!