How to get more people to share your law blog posts
Getting more people to share your law blog posts requires you to share other people’s posts and stories.
Hubspot’s Sam Kusinitz (@sdkusin) posted seven ways to get more people to share your posts.
- Post at the right times – Monday and Thursday at 9:30 ET.
- Have social sharing buttons and an email subscribe.
- Have a called out “tweetable quote” that will auto-tweet an excerpt.
- Strong imagery.
- Include a strong call to action (CTA), ie, download this ebook.
They’re okay, but the list misses by far and away the most important one for blogging lawyers. That’s sharing other’s content.
You need social media equity to get other’s to share your blog posts across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and email. You earn social media equity by sharing items of value to your target audience.
I have a RSS reader set up on my iPad (Mr Reader). I receive a steady flow of news and information from influential sources (bloggers and mainstream media) which I subscribe to. I also receive Google News Stories in my reader from influential sources which stories include keywords and key phrases which I monitor (companies, solutions/products, and terms of art in my industry).
I regularly share items I think my followers would be interested in. Mostly on Twitter, but some on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. In each share I attribute the story/post to the reporter, blogger, or other source. On Twitter I do that with their Twitter handle. This way they see that I shared their item.
By giving before expecting to receive, I pick up followers and people who enjoy sharing my blog posts. Because I am following influential sources, companies and individuals, and sharing their items, my posts then get shared by trusted sources with a large number of followers.
Do this and you end up with a snowball effect. You pick up more followers and more people sharing others’ content first shared by you. You are spinning off a lot of love. Love that will come back to you via your posts being shared.
There are so many more benefits than trying to increase shares by posting times or calls to action.
- Like I said the people who are sharing are influencers in your space. You build meaningful relationships with the people whose items you share and the people who share yours. Relationships which lead to speaking invitations, being called on news stories, being cited in blogs, and business.
- You grow a learning network. Blogging/social media certainly grows your business, but sharing like this grows your learning network and gets you focused on reading things that’ll keep you at the top of your game.
- Establishes you as an intelligence agent. How many other lawyers have their RSS reader on their iPad so they can share valuable news, insight, and commentary they see? You will pick up a lot of followers who will see you as a must follow source.
- Clients, prospective clients, referral sources, and the business community see you staying up to speed like no other lawyer. Other lawyers may be staying up to speed, but it’s not transparent.
Getting your content shared is all about networking online, not gimmicks and tactics. Business networking, at heart, is all about seeing what you can for others. Same here with getting your posts shared.
Try it. You may find, like me, that before you go to share one of your own posts on Twitter, someone else may already have done so.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Alan Levine.