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Episode 143: How to Make Your Content More Shareable on Social Media
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Krista and I sit down in today's episode to chat about how to make content more shareable. Content takes time to create, and you want to make sure that you get the most out of it. Today we're sharing a few things we do to our content to make sure it gets as much visibility across the web as possible.
For show notes visit...https://daveyandkrista.com/how-to-make-your-content-more-shareable-on-social-media/
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Transcript
How Images Go Viral
00:00:05
Speaker
Another thing to note if we're thinking about shareability, I've seen images from blog posts go viral but when that happens it's often because the blog post had a great story. If somebody just sees a great image and they don't know the story behind it, it may be a lot less shareable than if they know that those reason that this bride had seven puppies at her wedding is because she works at a shelter.
Introduction to the Brands at Book Show
00:00:29
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones. Chris and I sit down in today's episode to chat about how to make content more shareable. Content takes time to create, and you want to make sure that you get the most out of it. Today, we're sharing a few things we do to our content to make sure it gets as much visibility across the web as possible.
Feedback and Resources for Listeners
00:00:55
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at DavyandChrista.com for the resources that we mentioned during the episode, especially all of those tutorials, such as how to make Pinterest graphics in Photoshop and Canva. As always, we want to hear from you. Let us know what content you'd like to see on the Brand Side Book podcast as we move forward to leave your feedback. Just send us a VM on Instagram at DavyandChrista. Now onto the episode.
New Year Content Anticipation
00:01:22
Speaker
All right. Welcome back to another episode of the Brands of Book Podcast. One of our final episodes of the year. Although, by the time this comes out, it'll be the new year. It'll be the new year. This is one of my favorite weeks, I think. Yes. I feel like everything's slowing down a little bit. You've eaten way too many Christmas cookies. Yes, that is not good. People keep bringing them over. And you know my philosophy in the whole thing, the best way to remove a temptation in the house is just by eating it.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's also to your benefit because all of them, I think, contain gluten and Jack and I can't eat gluten. So you're literally the only one who can eat all of these cookies that are coming to our house. Yeah. But I always decide, you know, I'm going to diet after I finished all of this entire tub of cookies. And then another one will show up. Instead of, you know, just giving them away. By the time this episode comes out, you should be hopefully in the clear of all the cookies. So people, you should check on Davey and see how he's doing with his commitment. Yeah.
00:02:18
Speaker
Hopefully. Hopefully. We'll see.
Creating Shareable Content
00:02:21
Speaker
Well, anyways, today we are chatting about how to make content more shareable on social media. I'm excited about a lot of the content we have coming up too. We're doing a website speed series on YouTube that people are going to be able to check out in the new year. Vanessa Kynes and her family's coming to hang out here in Virginia for a day or two. And we'll record our Pinterest for 2022 episode. Which I think is probably going to be a
00:02:43
Speaker
most impactful one yet because Pinterest has changed so much just in the last few months. Yeah. And she's done this type of episode on the Ransombook podcast for the last couple of years. And I feel like it's always one of the more popular episodes. Yeah. I'm excited to listen. Yeah, that's exciting. So today's episode though about making content more shareable in social media. Basically, I think another way to think about this is
00:03:05
Speaker
how to make the most of your content as well. You know, a little bit of a different angle. We talked about appropriating content or reusing content, things like that. So this is a little bit of a different angle, but I think gets it the same thing, which is, you know, if we're going to spend time creating content, we want to make sure that we get the most out of it.
00:03:22
Speaker
And you want to make sure that it's something that people are drawn into and hopefully that they reshare. And so this blog post is going to be a blog post too. Today's podcast is talking about how to make sure that you're setting yourself up so that that post is easy to reshare.
00:03:37
Speaker
you're already giving away tips. I really like this topic. Yes. Yes. You were very, it's funny because I feel like when we started talking about this topic, I was like, what are we even going to talk about? And then all of a sudden I have this, you know, probably near thousand word outline in front of me. Yeah. I mean, if you can't tell, Davey's not the one who does this to our blog posts.
00:04:00
Speaker
I mean, I just come up with the content or not all the content, that's for sure. But I come up with a lot of the content. But beyond that, yes, it's basically out of my hands at this point. Yes, you write it and then I make it shareable. That's right. So anyways, I guess we should just dive in and chat a little bit about these tips. And it looks like we have five or six
00:04:22
Speaker
I think there are seven or eight. Yeah, seven or eight tips to talk about here when it comes to making content more shareable on social media. And I think that might sound like a lot to people, but I think we have a lot of really good workflows. So hopefully you can chat about that a little bit as we go through each of these tips. And I think really making this a rinse and repeat process really comes down to having a good workflow for it. And I think it becomes pretty easy once you have a good workflow for it.
00:04:47
Speaker
Yeah. And a few of these tips you only do once. So I'll throw that down there too. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start with tip number one.
Crafting Engaging Headlines
00:04:55
Speaker
So tip number one, you need a good headline. Think about it this way. Like there's a reason that headlines are phrased a certain way on the magazines that are at the grocery store checkout. They're designed to be attention getting. So you want to make sure that your headlines are more
00:05:11
Speaker
catchy and more benefit oriented. Let's say that you're writing a blog post about wedding day timelines. So instead of saying like everything you need to know about wedding day timelines or my advice on wedding day timelines, you might say like seven tips for a stress free wedding day timeline. And so then people know that there's a finite number of tips that kind of know that it's probably worth their read because they're going to get seven tips.
00:05:36
Speaker
and they know the benefit for them. So a more stress-free wedding day because they read this blog post.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, and I'd say that the great thing about headlines is that they can be swapped out without having to change the content, right? And so sometimes if you create a piece of content, you think it's going to be more popular than maybe it has been so far, one of the things that you can do is go back and just test as to whether it's the headline or not. We've done this on lead magnet landing pages, for instance, so a little bit of a different use case here. But instead of going back and changing the lead magnet, just changing the headline, and we've seen a lot of
00:06:12
Speaker
variation in terms of conversion even when it comes to a lead magnet download page just by changing the headline and making it benefit-oriented and using power words in your headline, I think really increases the chance that it's going to catch somebody's attention.
00:06:27
Speaker
power words, especially things like how to, because if you're saying like how to do something, that's something that a lot of people might be Googling. And so that can capture their search intent. I think that one of your new SEO tools also analyzes headlines, which I have been enjoying using in our website.
00:06:44
Speaker
There's definitely headline analyzing tools out there. There's also, I think, maybe what you're thinking about, or maybe not. But the first thing that comes to mind for me is that Google has been rewriting people's titles, page titles, and so this is a tool to check those page titles. There's one in our website that analyzes your headline and tells you how successful it is. My mind is completely elsewhere. I think it's with ranked math, right?
00:07:08
Speaker
It added a headline checker. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so SEO tools do have... It gives you a score for the impact it thinks your headline will have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's right. And that's just like analyzing if you're using power words and stuff like that. Exactly. And there's not... I would say RankMath is probably not the only SEO tool that has that. Right. My guess is that a few of the other ones have that as well. So you could check your SEO tool to see if it already has a headline checker there for you. So should we move on to number two? We can.
00:07:38
Speaker
Tip number two is include text. So even if you're blogging something like a wedding that is mostly images, make sure you include at least some text at the top. So not only is that going to be better for search engines because it also is going to help readers understand the context of the day.
00:07:55
Speaker
Who are the people in the images? Why do they matter? What makes this wedding unique? Maybe why did you shoot it the way that you did? Another thing to note, if we're thinking about shareability, I've seen images from blog posts go viral, but when that happens, it's often because the blog post had a great story.
00:08:12
Speaker
If somebody just sees a great image and they don't know the story behind it, it may be a lot less shareable than if they know that those reason that this bride had seven puppies at her wedding is because she works at a shelter. I think Caroline Logan had an image of a bride with a ton of puppies and it got picked up everywhere. Yeah. Like picked up on Ellen and people in the Today Show. Yeah. And I don't remember why she had all the puppies. I think it was something like that though.
00:08:37
Speaker
Yeah. I think that's good advice. I'm a big fan of including texts for the SEO benefit, but I also think that's true. Whenever you see even images go viral, typically there's some sort of story behind the image, which is why the image went viral to begin with.
00:08:52
Speaker
That might not be always the case, but I think it's often the case. And so even if you don't feel like you are a good writer, setting up different systems to make it easier to write about the day. I know back when you were shooting, you would have a questionnaire that you sent over before, right? Before the wedding.
00:09:08
Speaker
We did it a couple of times. So we, when they first inquired, we asked them a series of questions like how did they meet? What did they choose their wedding venue? Like things like that to help us get to know them. But then I can also use the answers in our blog posts to help write about it. And then in their pre-wedding questionnaire, we asked them some questions too, to help us like learn about the story of the day. And so not only did that prepare us to know how to shoot the day. So like,
00:09:32
Speaker
if we knew that the color blue was a significant part of their wedding because it had a special meaning, then we knew to shoot the blue things on the wedding day. But then we also could talk about that in the blog post. And so it was like a win-win. Yeah. And so you always felt like it was hard for you to write about those things. Yeah. I'm not naturally a writer like you are.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, see, I don't think you give yourself no credit. But point being is that that was an easy way for you to take stuff that was already in our workflow and make it easy for you to write about the day. Yes. Yeah. Okay, cool. Well, moving on.
Blog Posts for Enhanced Shareability
00:10:04
Speaker
Tip number three.
00:10:05
Speaker
create blog posts for even things like podcast episodes and YouTube channels. And the reason behind that is because it's not always easy to share about the content created on those platforms, especially if it's something like a podcast episode where there's nothing to share on Pinterest except for a direct link.
00:10:23
Speaker
but you can't like go to the podcast page, click the pin it button and pin anything. Or maybe it would do like the episode, the whole show as a whole, but it's not going to be formatted properly for Pinterest. But if you give those things like podcasts and YouTube videos and online home, you can add share graphics. And so it's easier for people to share a direct link to your blog posts. It's easier for Pinterest to pick it up and share it to it as well.
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, and again, I think just from showing up, kind of capturing as much search visibility as possible, right? So, if someone searches on Google, right, you'll see thumbnails of actual YouTube videos. But if that YouTube video is also embedded in a blog post on your website, that's a second place that you could potentially show up.
00:11:05
Speaker
you know, podcasting basically its own search engine as well. I mean, people go on iTunes and Spotify and search for episodes that have to do with certain topics or have certain guests. So, showing up in all these different places I think is super helpful. Again, just from a search visibility standpoint.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yes. Also, because if you're sharing on Facebook, if you just share a link to one of those places on Facebook, it doesn't always pick up the right data and it's not always the right format. Same with Pinterest. So that's another reason why it's good. So not just for Pinterest, I forgot to mention Facebook sharing.
00:11:38
Speaker
Yeah. And I think personally, I like being able to send people from like our email list to our website versus sending them to iTunes, right? So when you can send people the assets you own versus assets you don't, I think that's better. Also, even from the YouTube perspective, if we're doing some sort of how to post, yeah, it's really great to have a YouTube video that actually shows those things. But it's nice to have written directions as well or
00:12:03
Speaker
written content that might elaborate on things that you just can't get to in the video, especially with the kinds of how-to posts that we do. Occasionally something will change, but it doesn't change enough for it to warrant a new video. So it's nice to have the written portion so we can point out some of those changes without having to rerecord the entire video.
00:12:21
Speaker
And I don't know if this is always true in all instances, but I've heard that some social media platforms don't like when you share to other social media platforms. It can actually hurt the shareability. So some of them like it better when you share to your website and then that website links off to something like YouTube.
00:12:37
Speaker
That's really interesting. I haven't heard that. I'm going to have to look that up. I've heard that about Facebook, but I'm not a social media expert. Facebook, I feel like, is kind of like that. I mean, I could just see that being true of Facebook. I don't know if it's true of Facebook for sure or not. Nobody really knows what the algorithm does.
00:12:57
Speaker
And one thing I appreciate about a lot of these tips is that, yes, they do make content more shareable, but there are all sorts of other benefits for doing these things, right? So, you keep on talking about the way in which it makes content more shareable and I feel like I'm chiming in with, oh, yeah, and it's great to do this because of XYZ. And so, I think that's really like you want to get the most bang for your buck when you're creating content because this for people is going to be one of the most time intensive things that they do.
00:13:24
Speaker
Yeah. Good. All right. Awesome. Moving on. Tip number four, is that right? Yes. Make sure that every post has at least one image. And so that's specifically for Pinterest because if you have a great post, maybe it's like a great how-to post and you have zero images in it and somebody wants to pin
00:13:42
Speaker
that post to remember it or to share about it, it needs to have an image to actually show up on Pinterest. And so in an ideal world, I think blog posts would probably have images that go with the actual content of the blog post, but then you would also create like a Pinterest share graphic. And if you head to any one of our blog posts, you're going to see this at the very bottom. So it's typically a kind of vertical shaped image.
00:14:04
Speaker
Pinterest likes a two to three image ratio size and it's going to include typically an image and then the blog post. And then we'll also add alt text to the images because not only is that good for search engines, but the Pinterest Pin It button is going to pick up that alt text and it's going to put it in as like the caption on Pinterest. Pinterest is one of those platforms.
00:14:27
Speaker
You know nothing about it. Okay. Nothing is a strong word. I feel like I've learned a lot more about it because now we're advertising on Pinterest more. And that's a really interesting development that we should just do a podcast episode about that. We have more clients over at Till Agency that are advertising on Pinterest now. We've been advertising on Pinterest lately. So lots to share there. But yes, I mean, it's because it's a platform I don't use. Right.
00:14:53
Speaker
You can tell that Kate and I do all the Pinterest for our business. It's not like I'm scrolling through Pinterest trying to find different things. Another thing I'm going to add to this is that we don't typically just make one image for each post. We'll make at least one image to share and a video or two and then we'll also try to put together an idea pin. An idea pin could be a video or it could be kind of like a carousel of images.
00:15:20
Speaker
And so that way in the future, we can keep sharing this content and hopefully gives it more chances to be seen and gives it more of a longer life. And that's a tip that we learned from Vanessa.
00:15:31
Speaker
Yeah, and when this episode comes out, be sure to check out our YouTube channel because I don't know if you mentioned this, but we're going to or you're going to be creating a tutorial on how to create Pinterest graphics in Photoshop and Canva. Yes, and how to turn static content into a video reel that you can use on Instagram stories, Instagram reels and Pinterest. Yeah, so lots of tutorials coming out with this episode in particular. So if you're listening and you're like, that sounds great, but I wish I knew how to do those things, check our YouTube channel.
00:16:00
Speaker
And I hope that you guys are picking up on the fact that when we're doing something, a lot of times it's for multiple
Utilizing Multiple Platforms
00:16:05
Speaker
reasons. So even if it's something as simple as adding alt text to an image, it's for search engines. It's for impaired visibility. Alt text is what you're looking for. I said alt text.
00:16:16
Speaker
It's for the visually impaired and it's going to be for Pinterest. So three benefits just by doing one simple thing. And the same with like, if we're making, if we're taking the time to create a video real, we're going to use it probably in four different platforms. What are the platforms? TikTok, Instagram reels, well, I guess three platforms, but Instagram reels, Instagram stories, probably Pinterest video, like as a static pin and then Pinterest as an idea pin. Yeah. We need to start posting the TikTok.
00:16:44
Speaker
We do. Okay. People are like, Davey doesn't even know what's going on. We have a TikTok. All right. Well, follow us on TikTok, people.
00:16:57
Speaker
Add social share buttons to blog. That's tip number five. This is something you guys only have to do once. If you're using one of our designs a lot, and I think at least the newer ones, this is built in. But if you head to our blog posts, you'll see at the very bottom, there's a share this post to Pinterest, Facebook, email, and Twitter. I don't know how many people actually share to Twitter anymore, but it's there in case you want to do it.
00:17:26
Speaker
Somebody represent us over on Twitter, please. We do not typically share to Twitter. I knew we didn't share to Twitter. I know we talked about sharing a TikTok, but you know, I'm not to drag us into any privacy concerns, you know, those sorts of things. There's just other concerns that I have with TikTok that I'll save for another podcast. Yeah, we do. Probably not another podcast, you know, but yeah.
00:17:49
Speaker
TikTok is definitely the best for creating video reels right now. I know we've had that conversation. But these sharing buttons, and we're going to put out a tutorial video on how to add them to your site. And then you can also use extra plugins if you're a WordPress user. So something like Social Warfare or the Pinterest Pin It button, there are tons of social sharing.
00:18:10
Speaker
There's got to be probably a thousand options. You can add. I would check too of the plugins you're using because a lot of times we're not using the full functionality of the plugins that we have on our websites. So check there first and see if you can add that functionality through an existing plugin before adding yet another plugin to your website. If you're a show user or an elementary user, you can use the native features and there's videos that will go with the blog post version of this podcast episode that we will include.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yes, a tongue twister. I know, because we make so many different formats for our content. All right, so I believe this is tip number six, even though on my outline it says number seven, setting up open graph details. This is more of a Davy tip, but yes.
00:18:52
Speaker
So you put that there for me. All right. Good to know. Yeah. So you want to make sure that these are set up. I mean, the easiest way to set these things up is through a SEO plugin, right? Like if you're a WordPress user, RankMath, Yoast, SEO Press. If you want to compare those different platforms, I have a YouTube video comparing those three. If I can save you some time, we use RankMath. I also think SEO Press is a good SEO plugin as well. That should take care of most of your open graph detail
00:19:19
Speaker
problems. Other platforms like Showit and Squarespace, I'm sure, probably a lot of that stuff is taken care of for you. There's nothing really you have to do. And if you're wondering why do I need to set this up? This is something that you would set up so that let's say somebody shares a link to your blog post on Facebook, which is typically, I feel like the area that this most shows up. They share a link to your blog post on Facebook and it might just pick up random text and a random image, especially if your blog post doesn't have any images. So you might see like,
00:19:48
Speaker
I've seen like featured on badges show up and then like weird texts or like your copyright bio area at the very bottom. But if you set up the open graph details and then you customize this for each blog post, it's going to pull in your post featured image, your title, and then the excerpt that you actually want people to see, which doing all of this is going to encourage people to actually click on your links instead of just wondering what that weird image is that they're scrolling past.
00:20:14
Speaker
Sure. In general, if you're having issues with what image is being shared to Facebook and you feel like you have set a featured image in the right place, then open up the Facebook debugger tool. If you just Google search Facebook debugger, and then you throw in that URL, it's going to kind of show you all the details relevant to that page. And typically, if you scrape that page,
00:20:36
Speaker
then it should update. So occasionally, that's what's happening. Should do another tutorial on that. Can't promise it's going to be out at the same time this podcast episode comes out. But yeah, so as far as the Open Graph stuff, you should really just have to set, let's say, a title, an excerpt, and set a featured image. And that should be good enough as long as you have one of those plugins, if you're a WordPress user, set up correctly.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah. And I've noticed that if you have that set up correctly and you're already optimizing your posts using the search engine plugin, it typically you don't have to do anything else. It just picks that up automatically and you don't have to go in and fix the social media details. Yeah. And so typically you'll see like something like OG details missing or something like that. And that's your indication that something along these lines is not working quite right. Right. Yeah. Cool. All right.
00:21:26
Speaker
I'm not sure that section fit into this episode. It did because how are people going to share about the post if it's going to show up funky in social media? I feel like that's sort of like a bonus conversation. Okay. Last
Importance of Sharing Content
00:21:40
Speaker
tip.
00:21:40
Speaker
Last tip, make sure that you are sharing your content yourself. So if you don't start the sharing, people might not even know that the post exists to go and share it themselves. So some ways that we share content, when we share things, we like to share things not only in IG stories, but we also find that, especially if we're sharing a blog post, that it's good to share it to the feed and to make sure that whatever we're sharing in the feed has the title of the post on the image or on the video.
00:22:09
Speaker
Because otherwise, as people are scrolling, especially if you don't have their sound on and it's a video or they're going through something fast, they might not realize that what you're talking about is actually a link to a new piece of content. And so even though those posts might not be so pretty and might not always look so great in the feed, we've seen in our statistics that they get a lot more saves and a lot more clicks, like a ridiculous amount more saves and clicks if we put the title of the text over the image than if we don't.
00:22:36
Speaker
even though it's kind of ugly. Yeah, it's not as pretty. We try to make it pretty, but it doesn't always work as well. But I mean, that's a good point. I mean, dude, you know, sometimes, and this is a hard conversation, I feel like we're very brand oriented people. I have to have this conversation all the time. I feel like you're looking at like... Well, it certainly includes you, which is sometimes we have to make conversion decisions.
00:22:57
Speaker
aren't the prettiest. Red buttons. And that's okay. Not that your button has to be read to convert, but say decisions like that. Yes, a little contrast there. But yeah, I mean, this is something I have a big believer in is that, especially if you've been doing this for a number of years, and you feel like you've vlogged for the last, who knows, two years, five years, 10 years, you probably have content on your website that's buried deep down that just needs to be refreshed a little bit and reshared.
00:23:22
Speaker
And we do this, we share all blog posts on social media all the time, especially on Instagram and Facebook. One great thing about especially Facebook is that you can use something like co-schedule to keep sharing things in the future. So when you go to share blog posts, you can set it to share a week later, a month later, a year later.
00:23:39
Speaker
We need to figure out another tool because we co-scheduled for a long time. It was fine. I was grandfathered into an old plan and they finally kicked me out of it. I didn't like how all that went down, so I just decided not to use it anymore. I wasn't sure if you were still using it because it doesn't log in on my user.
00:23:56
Speaker
But we use later. So if you use a tool like later or I'm sure some of those other tools are similar. We use later for Instagram. Yeah, but you can use it for Facebook as well. So we need to switch to a tool like that for the Facebook side of things. And then there are Pinterest ones that you can do too that I'm sure you can bring up again with Vanessa on her episode. We'll have to ask. Yeah. We'll have to ask. That's changed a little bit too. You'll find out. I'm on the edge of my seat.
00:24:24
Speaker
All right, awesome. Well, that's it. Anything else to add to this? I don't think so.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yeah. So this might seem like a lot, but remember workflows make this a lot easier. All right. So I would put together, you know, if you're, especially if you're just starting out, you know, creating a workflow where, you know, you have a checklist and anytime you create a piece of content, you know, that you're going to do, you know, XYZ to that piece of content, you're going to schedule it to be shared, you know, immediately a week out, a month out, you know, every quarter from there on out, as long as it's good content, those sorts of things, I think make a lot of this much more manageable.
00:24:58
Speaker
Yes. I have a checklist for every blog post that reminds me to make Pinterest graphics, to load it as a blog post. Like, do we have a YouTube video that week? Do we have a podcast episode that week? And then to make sure that all the graphics are made and then the team has different systems for sharing on Pinterest, sharing on Instagram. Yeah. And if you have a team, trust your team to do some things as well. You can tell that idea.
00:25:20
Speaker
I'm like, TikTok, we're sharing a TikTok? That's great. So, well, thank you for your time. I feel like we're back. I don't just feel like we're back in this phase. We are definitely back in this phase where we're timing these episodes with nap times. Oh, yeah. The monitor's off and I just keep checking it, hoping that it's not going to show up red. Yeah. Yeah. Because we can actually see him with where he is in the room.
00:25:43
Speaker
All right. So we should probably get back to baby Bennett. Yeah. All right. Well, coming soon, this episode along with a number of YouTube videos. So if you're listening to this episode, be sure to check out the show notes for all of these relevant YouTube video tutorials and be on the lookout for other front episodes in the new year, including Pinterest for 2022 with Vanessa Kynes, excited to sit down with her and chat about all of the changes on Pinterest. Yeah. Thanks, guys.
00:26:14
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to davianchrista.com.