What are Social Media Shares for Blog Posts?

7 min to read

When users spread your blog content on social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, those are social media shares for blog posts. This has the potential to influence the number of viewers of your blog content.

Social shares act as a form of word-of-mouth advertisement. They can influence blog traffic levels and may correlate with perceptions of content value and shareability. People can go beyond clicking a share button to “share” via copying and pasting a link, screenshot quoting, and embedding the post on different sites. Using diverse sharing methods may have an effect on the reach of your content.

Pro Tip:
Think about what type of "shareable snippet" you would want your followers to capture, and make it stand out visually in your post.
Key Takeaways:
  • Social media can help promote blog posts, but they will be shared if people find them useful or interesting
  • Sharing tools and data can track how far a post reaches and how people interact with it
  • Visuals may affect the reader's interest and ability to share content
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How do social media shares benefit the blog itself?

When your audience shares your blog posts on social media, it can impact the following aspects:

  • Traffic: Shares can be related to changes in audience engagement with posts, ads, and the blog itself.

  • SEO: Search engine algorithms may factor referrals into the blog’s ranking as blog awareness increases.

Pro Tip: 
Focus on generating content that relates to solving a problem or triggering an emotion, since such content gets shared often for the value it adds or how it connects with people.

What makes people share a blog post on social media?

People often share blog posts for the following reasons:  

  • It resonates with a certain identity or beliefs they hold.  

  • It includes content that may be of interest or informational to their community.

  • It may be associated with a cause or brand that the individual supports.
Pro Tip: 
Discover what drives your target audience to share things with others. What type of content do they usually share? Make content that meets these expectations.

What are some ways to encourage social media sharing of blog posts?

You can promote sharing by:

  • Ensuring social media buttons are conveniently positioned for user access.

  • Focusing on elements that are likely to attract attention.

  • Requesting the readers to share.

How can you track social media shares of your blog posts?

To know the share count of your post, you may use:  

  • Analytics offered by the particular social media site.  

  • Specific tools designed to manage social media.
Pro Tip: 
Track your share counts to see what content resonates with which platform.  This information can be used in considerations for future content.

What role do visuals (images, videos) play in the shareability of blog posts?

Including images and videos in blog posts can affect reader interest and the likelihood of sharing. Often, people’s attention is captured by the contents of the visuals, which makes them more likely to share something appealing.

Pro Tip: 
Be sure to add applicable visuals that are relevant to the subject and of high quality, while also making sure that they are properly optimized so that they look great when shared across various platforms.

Conclusion

Social media posts can affect the reach of blog content, but the chances of content being shared depend on how relevant it is and the motivations of the audience. Among the possible techniques for stimulating sharing, you can include adding share buttons and creating captivating content with graphics. Analyzing share metrics provides visibility into audience engagement and performance of the content.

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