How To Get Your Content Shared On Twitter


content shared on twitter

Creating good content? That is important. Getting it shared on Twitter? That is crucial. While primarily what you create is going to take the most time and energy, getting it seen is a big thing to consider. Social media is the driving force behind visibility and marketing, and one of your best tools.

Twitter in particular is a useful platform for its open nature, ease of use and popularity. Not to mention how many third party apps and services exist to measure the results of your marketing.

But how do you get your content shared on Twitter? How can you up the efficiency of your marketing on that particular platform? There are a number of ways.

Getting Content Shared on Twitter

1. Keep Content Quality High

This is an obvious step, and yet one that people routinely ignore. When your content quality is high, people enjoy it more. When they enjoy it, they are more likely to want other people to read it themselves. This means they will share it, either through a social button on the post or by directly linking from their account.

You should always aim to make your content the very best. Being consistent will also gain your followers, which means more future posts could be shared.

Actionable tip: Tweets with attached images (visual tweets) tend to get shared more.

Featured tool: Keep an eye on your Twitter analytics (inside Twitter ads) for the type of content your followers seem to enjoy more.

Twitter ads

2. Hashtags: Optimize Your Content For Sharing

Sometimes content is good, but it isn’t really shareable. You have to try and optimize your content to be shared by your target audience.

The best way to do that is to take a look at what is being shared the most. Is it posts written in list form? Is it on a particular topic? How many photos does it have? Narrow things down to establish patterns, and then exploit those patterns to write content that is made to be linked.

Featured tool: Hashtagify has their own chart of trending hashtags. Each hashtag in it has a “breakout date” and a “breakout score.” You can see hashtags trending last month, last week or just now.

Hashtagify

Twitter chats are also a very effective way to get your content shared using hashtags.

3. Ask People To Share

This is the simplest way to get a share, and an amazing number of people don’t do it. When you tweet your content, ask people to retweet it.

Social media expert Dan Zarrella did an experiment in retweeting, and he found that when he specifically asked “Please Retweet” he saw a 51% increase in RTs. When he wrote “Please RT” he got a 39% increase. Others have reported similar results when they have asked for their content to be shared.

Featured tool: ViralContentBuzz (of which I am a co-founder) is a non-intrusive way to put your content in front of power social media users for more retweets and shares.

ViralContentBuzz case study by bloggless

4. Embed Your Tweets

You may have noticed lately that a lot of blog posts will have embedded tweets sitting in the middle of them. This is an interesting way of breaking up a post using an image, but it is more than that.

It also offers people a chance to go to the original post on Twitter, find your Twitter profile, and share a post that has the additional benefit of a social tie in.

Featured tool: JM Twitter Cards lets you make much more of embed tweets by enabling Twitter cards on your blog posts.

JM Twitter Cards

5. Share More Than Once

Not all of your followers are going to be online when you post a link to your content. Even those who are might miss the link in the constantly updating stream of their follower’s updates. You should be posting links to your content multiple times on the day that you publish it.

Set a schedule that lets the link be sent out at least once every few hours. Ideally, it should be sent out once an hour. Don’t write them all as the same tweet, or it looks like spam. Instead, write different versions with the same link every time.

You will get more chances to catch the eye of your followers, and more retweets are inevitable.

Featured tool: Inline Tweet Sharer lets you create in-line “Tweet this.”

Inline Tweet Sharer

Read for more ways to re-package tweets for more shares.

Have a tip for getting more content shared on Twitter?

Bird Photo via Shutterstock


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Ann Smarty Ann Smarty is the founder of Viral Content Bee, a social media marketing platform, and the founder of SEO Smarty, an SEO consulting and link building agency.

12 Reactions
  1. Great article. The point that covers sharing more than once a day is something that I definitely have to keep in mind. MarketMeSuite offers a a great scheduling tool to do this that I think goes along with the other featured tools you have listed.

  2. Good post! This is a very helpful blog. You are right, Twitter’s openness makes it a perfect platform to get your content read, especially with the added bonus of the hashtag. Placing your content on Twitter is like casting a net in the middle of a school of fish – a vast opportunity of catch. In online marketing, we all believe that “Content is King” so getting it properly and effectively distributed to the viewing public is a must. Content is the most powerful tool you have in online marketing with which to win people over.

  3. These are very helpful tips. We’ve been putting together a lot of video content and have been trying to hone in on our social media strategy. I’m hopeful this will work!

  4. I notice how hashtags can really help with shares. But I didn’t know about sharing a tweet more than once. I don’t do that because I don’t want to pester my followers. But then it might work if you are sharing different stories everyday.

    • Hashtags work (and I think most Twitter users don’t mind them at all unlike Facebook users) but you shouldn’t use too many of them – that’s for sure!