We're constantly coming across great media and content on our customers' websites - videos, stories, event photos, blog posts. But creating great content isn't enough to drive traffic to your site. You have to find ways to get it in front of people and make it easy for them to share with others.
In this article from Maximize Social Business, Kristi Hines shares tips for how to optimize your blog content for social sharing. Here's how you can apply some of her suggestions to your NationBuilder website:
Include social sharing buttons
According to Hines, the easiest way to encourage people to share your content is to add social sharing buttons to your web pages. Fortunately, the pages on your NationBuilder website come with social sharing buttons already built in! No plugins or extensions. Just create a new blog post or any other type of page and the buttons are there.
Pay attention to your images
Let's face it - if you don't have a great image to go along with your content, it's not likely to catch people's attention. When someone is skimming through their Facebook news feed, it's the eye catching photos and visuals that are going to get them to stop and focus.
It's easy to add photos to your blog posts and other pages on your NationBuilder site. To make sure that your images get seen on Facebook and other platforms, go to Settings > Social media to upload a thumbnail. This is the image that will be displayed when the page is posted and shared.
Use social meta data
Meta data is important for getting people to interact with your content. It's the information that is displayed on a social media platform when your post is shared. Hines recommends adding code to your website to tell it what photo, title and description to use. There's no need for that with NationBuilder. You can easily set this information for each page. Just go to Settings to set the page Title (which will be displayed by search engines) and the Headline (which will be displayed by Facebook and Twitter).
To set a description for your page go to Settings > Social media. To make it really easy for people to share your content, you can write a post that will automatically be displayed when someone clicks on the social share buttons on your page. You can also use it to schedule a tweet or Facebook post from within NationBuilder.
Here are some additional resources to help you create and promote your content:
Using Facebook and Twitter to promote your nation
Sharing your site on social media
