Best Practices for Getting Shares, Likes, Etc on Social Media?

[OOMDODigital]

I wanted to know what the best practices are for getting people to re-tweet, like, share, and google plus your website.

What has worked best for all of you, and what has worked not so well?

Thanks!

[Keith-Eneix]

Promoting the heck out of your posts! : ) Here's a little insight into our social promotion. Basically, we took our website from about 300 hits per month to over 4000 in a 30 day period by doing social promotion with the following method:

1. Create an amazing article (curated content or developing your own) - Before you just pick anything off hand go check the social spaces to see what your target market is sharing on social spaces. Now you know what people like!

2. Develop an infographic on the article as well - You'll be able to promote your infographic on sites like visual.ly which may get featured to their user base. Not only that, visual,ly ranks incredibly well for content in the SERPS. Visuals really help people engage better with your content. You'll hit people who would rather look at a visual as well as the people who who may want to dig a little deeper into your article.

<address>3. Social Promotion - Ok this is a big list of promotion tactics that we use.... and it works really well (if you have good content). This is a link to my guide http://www.fannit.com/smm/social-media-marketing/. Basically, it's a checklist of things you can do to automate the process a bit. I'd stick it on here but... it's really big.</address>

<address> </address>

<address>I hope that helps! </address>

[Maayboli]

1. Create original  content.  Have some unique perspective. There is no substitute. Original is important than "amazing" as what is "amazing" is different to different audience. And if more people are sharing your content who cares if that was amazing to you or your company.
2. Timing: One of single most overlooked factor.  If you try creating/seeding content different time, different days you will see which days/time work for you. To run a test we shared same content, same network but at different times., The difference can be huge. We have seen swings of 1200%  based on time.
3. It gets better as you get some traction. social proof networking effects clearly helps as you get more shares.
4. Don't try to create content for the planet. Identify a niche audience initially and target them

[OOMDODigital]

So here's part two of my question.

I work mainly for auto dealerships and we do have buttons on them that have the facebook logo, the twitter logo, etc.

I've noticed that by contrast there are buttons on sites with a share, or retweet count on them. Do those serve as better calls to action to encourage people to share or like, etc?

Thanks!

[Keith-Eneix]

Yes, we use the sharebar for our wordpress sites (you can find HTML code as well)! It's a must have. I'm sorry I forgot to mention that in my original answer but you really should have some sort of share function that includes some or all of the following:

Google Plus
Like
Tweet
Pin
Share On Facebook
Stumble
Reddit

Look at the 2013 factors for ranking that MOZ just put out. The social shares have a big impact on rankings now..especially Google Plus http://moz.com/blog/future-of-search-ranking-factors

[Keith-Eneix]

Agreed on timing. Here's a trendy little infographic we did that might be helpful: http://www.fannit.com/social-media-infographic-when-are-the-best-times-to-post/

[OOMDODigital]

Keith,

Thanks for your quick response.

Do you recommend share buttons or like buttons that have a count next to them on the website, rather than the ones that do not?