social sharingMore Sharing means more traffic to your site.

Do you want to increase the number of shares on your site?  Do you want to encourage sharing from a mobile device?

We reviewed our site and took a look at what other people are doing to increase sharing.

1.  Display a Floating Widget to the left

As you scroll through a blog post it’s useful if the sharing options are still visible.

Digg Digg is a popular social sharing widget that supports this.

On Buffer App’s website you can see they use Digg Digg.  As you scroll through the post the sharing side bar moves with you.

 

social sharing buffer
The sharing option is always available

 

One problem with Digg Digg is that this bar doesn’t work particularly well on a mobile device.  When we used Digg Digg this is how it appeared on a Samsung mobile device.

 

Digg Digg Mobile
On a mobile device it’s difficult to see the sharing options

 

2.  Display a Floating Widget on top

You can display the widget so it appears up top and is always available when you scroll.  Syed Balkhi from wpbeginner has just released a social sharing widget which is fast to download and display and can be placed on top of your posts.

 

wpbeginner social share plugin
This sharing option is always available

As you move down the post this sharing option is always available.

3.  Display a floating toolbar on the side and on top

My friend Donna from Socially Sorted uses a plugin called Flare on her site which is quite similar to Digg Digg.  One big advantage is that as well displaying the widget on the left you can also display it on top of your posts.

When you view it on mobile the sharing bar on the left doesn’t appear but that’s fine because the one on top will!

 

socially sorted
Sharing works fine on a mobile device

 

 4.  Display Sharing at the bottom of a post

At the end of a post could be good place to encourage sharing and there are a couple of options.  Here is a plugin called Socialize which is used by guys over at SkyHiT Blog.

 

At the end of a post is a good place to encourage sharing
At the end of a post is a good place to encourage sharing

 

Another option is using a plugin such as Optinskin.  Flare also supports links at the end of a post also.

 5.  Display sharing options within the post

On Derek Halpern’s Social Triggers site you see that sometimes he uses click to tweet within his posts.  When there is a useful quote or piece of information within the post users can click a button to tweet it out.   When you click on this link you are brought back to the post.

 

Click to tweet
Click the button to tweet out the quote

 

6. Use a popup

You can also use a popup box which encourages you to tweet, share on Facebook etc.  Popup’s can be quite obtrusive so you need to be careful and ensure they don’t annoy your visitors.

 

7.  Give users some option for sharing

When you do decide which sharing method make sure to give people a couple of options (twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc).  The only thing to consider is that too many options can also lead to less sharing.

Neil Patel from Quicksprout only provides 3 options (Facebook, Twitter and Google +) as he found he gets more shares with less options.

So it’s important to give some options but not too much!

 

Final Comments

There are many ways to encourage blog visitors to share blog posts.  One key thing is to make sure it’s easy to share and it’s visible as users scroll.

What works for you to encourage sharing?  Will you check out any of the above tools we discussed?

 

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc


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