When we create fresh content for our website, we are used to thinking about search engine optimization, but how often do we think about how our content gets shared on social networks? What can we do to optimize our content for social sharing?
First of all, the obvious difference: when people use social networks, they want to connect in the first place, and they want to entertain and to be entertained in the second place. They look for information in a different way, so we have to present our information in a way that it will attract them.
Any share-friendly article starts with high-quality content. If your readers do not think the content is worth the time to read, then it is not likely to be shared.
Once you have the content taken care of, you need to make sure it has a title that stands out and pulls people in, while at the same time giving them an idea of what the article is about. You will also want to keep the title short so that it can be easily shared on media like Twitter where every message has to fit in 140 characters, including the URL.
Next, add high-quality, attention-grabbing photos or videos. It is best to use images with less details. Most social networks will show sized-down versions of your files, so having lots of details often leads to unclear, noisy images that are no longer attractive.
More Than Just Share-friendly Content So far, you may still find most of this very similar to good SEO practice. Under normal circumstances, social networks like Facebook and Google+ are perfectly happy to use the Title and Description meta-tags that you have provided as part of your SEO.
But if you're going to try to improve social sharing, you'll want to add a few extra pieces of information to your pages. In technical terms these are called Open Graph metatags, and you can find out all about their technical details on the Facebook Developer pages.
What is important to know is that social networks tend to use these tags instead of the standard metatags you create in SEO. In the rest of this article, we'll focus on the three most important Open Graph metatags for social sharing and on why you should add those to your pages. All of this is very simple to do with ActorsWebInfo's new Social Tools.
Image. Has this ever happened to you: you click on the Like button on a page, only to see later on that the article you Liked has been shared using an ad that was on the same page as the thumbnail image? You can prevent this from happening by defining what image Facebook and other networks use when your pages are shared. This way, your shared articles will always use that one, extra-attention-grabbing image that you picked for the article.
One thing to keep in mind is that Facebook is very particular about the size of these images; minimum 50 by 50 pixels, but no larger than 130 by 110.
Title. Research has shown that people on social networks are more likely to share entertaining or funny content. Sometimes, using a slightly different, more entertaining title for your content, can help make it more share-friendly.
Description. Here too, changing the description of the page to be a better fit to the attitude of the social network users that you are trying to reach, increases the likelihood of your content getting shared or clicked on.
Adding these extra pieces of information to your pages is extremely simple with ActorsWebInfo and takes just a few clicks of your mouse. You can set the social sharing image for all the pages on your site in the Site Properties Panel, but you'll want to make these settings separately for every page that you are trying to optimize fully. This is done from in the Page Options panel. You don't, of course, have to optimize every single page on your site. Focus on those pages that are most important.
And even if you don't specify these settings at all, ActorsWebInfo still has you covered, as we'll provide social networks with the content from your SEO settings.
Do you have any other suggestions to make content more social media share-friednly? Let us know in the comments below.
| 
Our 
