5 Tips To Boost Your Social Shares

Posted on Jun 28th 2016 in Social Media

Do you want to expand your hotel’s social reach? Then you need to drive more shares.

Generating lots of shares is key to building your brand, driving engagement and making sure your content gets discovered by the widest possible audience.

By fine-tuning the way your property creates and publishes content, you maximise the chance that it will get shared more often.

In today’s blog, we’ll look at 5 ways to boost your social shares.

1. Capitalise on Popular Topics

Using tools like BuzzSumo and PostReach to research the topics that are trending at the moment will help you create content that is more likely to be shared.

The idea is not simply to replicate the top shared content, but rather to pinpoint the most talked-about topics and see if you can add something new and interesting to the conversation.

2: Make Sharing Quick and Easy

Your guests are far more likely to share your content if doing so takes minimal effort on their part. If your website is experiencing consistent rates of traffic, capitalise on all those potential social shares by designing your content for quick and easy sharing on the major social platforms. Adding social buttons to your website is one of the most effective ways to do this. If you plan to add buttons at the end of each blog post, don’t forget to include a compelling call to action to tell your audience exactly what you want them to do next.

3: Get Serious About Crafting Great Headlines

A shareable piece of content starts with a great headline. Why? Because if the title of your blog article fails to grab people, they’ll dismiss it in an instant and move on to the next piece of content.

Recent content marketing research shows that online readers tend to be drawn to headlines which ask questions, include numbers and feel personal (using You, Your and You’re to make the reader feel they’re being addressed directly, for example). It’s worth remembering that when shared, the title of your article acts like a status update when it appears in people’s social feeds – it’s likely to be seen as a reflection of a user’s own opinion.

Want your most important content to generate more shares? Start by crafting your headlines with a social context in mind.

4: Add Visual Appeal

With the huge rise in popularity of Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest, social media as a whole has become far more visual.

To make your content stand out from the crowd and increase the likelihood that it will get shared, invest in high quality eye catching images that tie in with your headlines. Don’t have a graphic designer on your staff team? Don’t worry. There are plenty of stock photo sources out there which are free to use, as well as tools like Canva which offer an affordable way to create custom images for your posts. The site offers a selection of free, premade templates – simply add taglines that complement your headlines.

5: Concentrate Your Efforts During Peak User Hours

If you want to maximise shares and engagement, it makes sense to post at the times most of your guests are online.

For example, recent research has shown that Facebook usage peaks on weekend afternoons, while Twitter is typically used during the workday, but also in the morning and evening during the commute/journey home. Pinterest membership is overwhelmingly women, who tend to check their pins most in the evening.

Of course, there’s no universal ‘ideal posting window’ that will work for every business. Engagement is moulded by a host of factors which include geographical region and audience age. The only way to find out for sure what works best with your particular audience is to experiment, analyse and repeat until you find the winning formula.

Driving more social shares means winning over your audience with great content people naturally want to share. Once you’ve perfected the kind of content that resonates best with your audience, you can leverage opportunities to promote it for even more exposure.

How does your hotel encourage more social shares? Let us know in the comments below!