As Google makes changes to the way it ranks and displays websites in organic search, social media is becoming an increasingly important tool for small businesses to gain visibility online. By creating pages for your business on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest, you can reach out to your core audience and interact in a way that has never been possible before.
With the introduction of vertical search, many savvy small businesses are now also operating blogs across the web. Diligently writing informational articles focused on industry and company news, desperately trying to target the right audience in any way possible. But if you are not promoting this content correctly, then you may aswell be broadcasting your message into the deep, dark void of outer-space.
Utilising social media channels correctly to optimise your web traffic is an important part of improving your online visibility. Too many online publishers are wasting time writing great content without considering what happens after they have hit the “publish” button. After publishing a blog article, the next step should always be to promote the content you have written to an audience of interested people and using social media to do so is one of the simplest ways.
Adding social media buttons to your blog enables your readers to share your message to a larger audience with just one click and without ever having to leave your website. If you allow social counts to be displayed too then it also becomes a great way for both you and your audience to get an at-a-glance idea of how viral the content you are producing is.
The following short video will guide you through the simple process of adding social sharing buttons to your Google Blogger blog using “Share This”.
Video Transcript:
Choosing Your Platform
Step 1 of the “Share This” website asks you to choose your platform. There are several options to choose from including WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and even just standard website code.For the purpose of this video I’m going to select Blogger, but more advanced users can also add the buttons to a Blogger blog by selecting “website” and editing the blogs HTML directly. Upon selecting blogger, you can see a green box will highlight your selection, then click “Step 2” to select your style of button.
Next you are presented with some options for the style of button you would like to add to your blog. The first is a minimalistic square icon, available in either 16px or 32px sizes. The second option is for standard buttons with a social count displayed horizontally and the third option is for the same style buttons but with the count displayed vertically, which is the option I’m going to choose for my blog. So again, click to highlight, then click on step 3 to customize.
Identifying the correct social buttons to use
Next you will need to decide which social buttons you are going to use on your blog. When it comes to social, we all tend to think of the big three. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. But the truth is that there are a massive amount of social networks available to use on the internet. One question I’m often asked is “what social network should I be using?”, the fact is that it really depends on what type of industry you are in. For instance; Pinterest is the perfect platform for home decor, weddings and visual products or services. It all comes down to your business brand and the relevancy of its broadcast to the target audience. Don’t forget that there are hundreds of social media platforms available, don’t be afraid to experiment, its the only way to discover what works best for you.
Once you have identified which social channels compliment the industry that you are in, you need to start promoting your business within these channels by adding the corresponding social buttons to your blog. You can see there are plenty of options to choose from within the menus but in this instance, I’m going to be adding social buttons to my motoring blog and I have chosen four social buttons that correspond to the same places in which I am maintaining a social presence. These are; Facebook likes, Tweets, Google Plus 1’s and Technorati shares.
What about the CopyNShare tool?
CopyNShare is a new tool added to “Share This” which will add a little more functionality to your blog.
The first tickbox labelled “measure copy and shares of your websites content” will add some code to your blog that means anytime a person copies and pastes your content directly from your blog into another entity, such as their own blog or social media profile, then your URL will automatically be appended to the end of content along with the words “see more here:”. This ensures that you are always referenced correctly and linked to as the source of information.
The second tickbox labelled “measure copy and shares of your websites URLs” will add
a “Share This” hashtag to the end of shared URL’s in order to measure how often your URLs are shared across the internet. The results are displayed within their own “social quality index” or SQI analyzer.
Once you have finished customising your social buttons click the green “finished: get the code” button at the bottom of the page.
Adding the buttons to your Blogger blog
If you are not logged in to a “Share This” account a pop-up will now appear asking you to either sign-in or create an account. If you look at the bottom right corner there is also an option to “skip this for now”. If you click this you will then be asked to choose from one of two options; multi post or direct post. Multi post is the option to select which will keep users on your blog to share rather than direct post which will redirect them to the corresponding social channel to share. So highlight your option and click the green “Go” button to proceed. You may need to allow pop-ups from “Share This” in order to proceed. It also saves time if you make sure you are logged into your blogger account before clicking.
Next a blogger screen will open asking you to select the blog you wish to add the social buttons to from a drop down list. Simply do this and then click the “Add widget” button.
The “Share This” social buttons have now successfully been added to your blogger blog. So now once you’ve finished creating your best content, make use of those buttons, share your articles within the right social circles and watch your web traffic rise.
