If you’re already spending the time creating good content on your blog, you want to do everything you can to get more eyes on it.
One of the best ways to do that is by creating blog posts that answer the questions you hear most from your customers and leads. Of course, you’ll want to sprinkle a bit of long-tail keyword research in there for good measure! It can be as simple as typing in the phrase you think you want to write about into an incognito browser and seeing what other search terms arise.
From there, a few tweaks to how you format your content, write your title or determine your word count could be just what you need to increase the social shares for your blog posts.
A new study from Backlino and BuzzSumo analyzed which of the 912 million posts they studied were shared the most. Read on to learn data-driven tips to implement on your blog!
5 Ways to Increase Social Shares for Your Blog Posts
Title
To boost those social shares, write a very, very long headline. We’re talking between 14 and 17 words, or between 80 and 100 characters if you want to get specific. Those get shared 77 percent more than short headlines.
But keep in mind that Google only displays the first 50 to 60 characters of your title, according to Moz’s latest analysis. So, if you write a long title for social, make sure it will still make sense to someone who finds it on Google.
Length
What’s your goal for your blog? Is it primarily to drive social shares and engagement? If so, you’ll want to pen posts between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Articles in that range get 56 percent more social shares than shorter pieces.
But if the goal for your blog is backlinks, you’re going to want to bump that number up even more. Posts that are longer than 3,000 words get an average of 77 percent more backlinks than content under 1,000 words.
Format
Unsurprisingly, list posts got the most shares on social (an average of nearly 250 shares), followed by why posts (an average of almost 200 shares) and what posts (averaging just under 150 shares). If you’re covering a why or what topic, go ahead and add a question mark to your title. Those headlines get 23 percent more shares.
Publish day
Good news! You can post your blog posts any day that works best for you since social shares are about the same for every day of the week. Sunday does seem to have a slight edge (a 1.45 percent increase in social shares).
Backlinks
Google takes backlinks into account when ranking your blog posts. But those backlinks are extremely hard to get! Only 6 percent of content has a single backlink, and only 2.2 percent had links from multiple sites.
Sorry to say, even if your article gets shared lots on social, that will likely have no impact on the number of backlinks you get. But why posts, what posts and infographic get the most backlinks, so write more of those!
