Online marketing is all about building trust between you and your target audience. Aside from a trust-driven content marketing strategy, another way to build confidence and stimulate conversions is to offer social proof. According to research, 92% of people trusts peer recommendations while 70% believes product reviews for purchase decisions.
One particular strategy is to show the number of social media shares your content gets. It can be a tough call, however, if you’re not getting enough engagement from your social media followers. First things first, you need to offer your readers a better and more convenient way to share your content.
Below are some of the best plugins that will help you get more social shares:
1. Better Click to Tweet
The Better Click to Tweet plugin allows you to write “tweetable” quotes in your content. The best thing about this plugin is the simplicity and quickness of the entire process. All you have to do is to write the tweetable quote and choose your brand’s Twitter username.
With Better Click to Tweet, your audience can now opt to tweet individual quotes rather than the entire post. The quote will be highlighted from the rest of the content along with the “Click to Tweet” button right at the bottom-right corner. Just make sure to choose powerful and authoritative words in your tweetable quote.
2. Social Warfare
Social Warfare is your one-stop shop when it comes to social sharing buttons. But unlike other generic plugins, you get an unparalleled level of customization, functionality, analytics, link shortening, and other advanced features. It also supports network-specific functions like the re-pin button for images, click to tweet for tweetable quotes, and so on.
Social Warfare’s greatest strength is the depth of customization. Under Display Settings, you can choose where to accurately show sharing buttons on posts, pages, or your entire site. You can also write a default custom message whenever your content is shared in social networks.
3. Social Locker
The Social Locker plugin by OnePress works by locking your content—only showing the first few sentences—and asking your readers to like or tweet it first before revealing the rest of the article. It may sound counterintuitive to hold your content hostage, but it works if you are known to provide top-notch content.
While it is a surefire way to generate more social engagement, it does make it your absolute priority to make the best content possible. You are, after all, asking your audience to trust you first before you show what your brand is capable of.
4. Monarch
If you want a lightweight social sharing plugin that does the job fast and reliably, then Monarch is probably the tool for you. It features five placement options to help ensure that the social sharing buttons remain aligned to the site’s overall design. For example, you can choose to place them in a sidebar, as a popup, or at the bottom.
While these placement settings are preconfigured for visibility and engagement, you can delve deeper into the number of display settings available such as intro animations, delays, number of columns, and so on.
5. WP Content Resharer Pro
Keep in mind that getting your audience to share your content is not the only way to maximize social engagement. You should also grow your social media pages to amass followers and build your authority. WP Content Resharer Pro can help you by automatically sharing your content in a set interval—preventing your social media page to go stagnant as you generate more inbound traffic to your site.
However, it’s worth noting that WP Content Resharer is currently optimized to work for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter only. Incidentally, these are the top social sites that businesses and bloggers use to expand their network and communicate with their audience. Still, the plugin does come with a free version so you can quickly check whether it’s a good fit for your social media strategy.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, don’t forget that the success of your social media strategy all boils down to the quality of your content. As long as you offer great content from your site, the success of the plugins listed above is pretty much guaranteed.
