It can be disheartening when you share an awesome article on social media, only for none of your friends or followers to bother clicking on the link and engaging with it. But can you blame them? The modern social media user is forever being pulled from pillar to post so if you want them to give you the time of day, you’re going to need to get a little creative…
1. Write something at least!
At the very least, write something. There’s nothing worse than someone who shares a link to an article with zero context whatsoever and expects people to actually bother clicking on it.
You want some engagement? Write something!
2. Consider emphasising the content’s popularity
Are you sharing a particular blog post that has attracted dozens of backlinks from high PR websites? Why not mention that when sharing it on your social media?
For example: “This blog post has attracted 32 high PR backlinks since 2021. Why not give it a read and find out why!?”
But be honest. Tricking your followers into reading an underwhelming article is poor form. Use the truth to your advantage.
3. Use humour with relevant imagery
Social media should be fun! And a very effective way to encourage people to engage with your posts and click through to the content you share is by using humour.
Using the ‘popular blog post’ example mentioned above, you could use the iconic “Distracted Boyfriend” meme to emphasise its popularity and get a few “lols” while you’re at it.
4. Consider sharing the table of contents
Are you sharing a blog post with the “8 top tips for writing an engaging content preview for social media that your audience will find irresistible?”
Why not give your audience a sneak preview into what will be covered in the blog?
Start by describing the primary purpose of the post and then include a bulleted list of the details so readers can instantly determine whether or not it is something of value to them. It works!
5. Talk directly to the individual with conversational language
The key here isn’t to address your whole audience, but the individual engaging with the post. Use conversational language and speak to your readers as though they are old pals of yours.
Complex language and unnecessary industry jargon can be off-putting – especially where it isn’t needed.
- Keep it simple,
- get to the point,
- and write as you would talk to a friend.
6. Extract a quote from the article
Just as you would write a blog post with the intention of having a few key bits of info included in Google’s ‘Featured Snippets’, you should also have some awesome ‘quotable’ titbits that can be used to promote the post in your social previews.
Tease them with the quality of information to be found within…
7. Pre-empt their “Why do I care?” objection
Remember that every social media user is being advertised to constantly. One in three posts is a paid promotion / advert and even then, the other two ‘non-promotional’ posts come from friends or pages that they follow, scrambling for their attention!
If you want them to stop scrolling and invariably click-through to your post, you’re going to need to give them a pretty darn good reason.
One effective way of doing this is to tell them precisely why they should care. What’s in it for them?
The high-value traffic needs a little convincing!
8. Share an interesting / frightening fact or statistic
One of my favourite stats that came out of a social media study back in 2016 was: “6 in 10 of you will share this link without reading it.”
There are many iterations of that study which found that most people will comment on a social media post without even reading the article itself – and more often than not, those comments are negative…
In this case, sharing a similar statistic would make your readers feel far more inclined to give it a read! Just as if I were to ask you: “Are you sitting up straight or slouching?” – you’ll likely straighten your back, smirk, and think to yourself “You got me there, buddy boy!”
Final thoughts
Hopefully you’ve found some of the above tips to be rather enlightening. Which method will you adopt when you next share an article on social media?
Of course, if you don’t have the time to invest in perfecting your social media game, it’s always worth outsourcing to the professionals and hiring quality social media advertising services. You can reduce your workload and similarly improve your long-term engagement.