This week’s episode is all about social sharing. We talk about strategies and best practices for social – many of which we’ve been lazy in implementing ourselves (hence the title).
We’re now an award-winning podcast. Thanks Dan and Ian at TropicalMBA! We got the “Best New Podcast” award at the DCBKK conference.
And thanks everyone for getting us over 10,000 downloads!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:55 — 22.9MB)
The Core
Best Practices
- Optimize your profiles and pages:
- Include link to site, logo, interesting background image or banner.
- Make Tweets sticky.
- Lead Generation Cards for capturing email addresses.
- Social Sizing Cheat Sheet for finding the various dimensions for social networks.
- Recommended networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn (niche-specific).
- Don’t spread yourself too thin between channels, focus on the relevant ones.
- Personal vs. business account?
- Follow and mention people, deep link to posts on their site – good chance of getting a retweet.
- Use a service like HootSuite or Buffer to post to multiple channels, schedule tweets and posts.
Technical Implementation
- Implementing it yourself
- Problems:
- Load time. Each button checks back with the appropriate service to get the share count.
- Negative social proof. Show social counts if 0 or a low number?
- Don’t display social sharing buttons at the very top, before people read?
- Will they dilute or distract from your call to action?
- Limited customization options.
- Plugins:
- Socialize: Doug’s recommendation, most customization options and call to action boxes.
- Digg Digg: easier to set up out of the box, more popular, but limited customization.
- Social Metrics: for tracking share counts across posts and pages.
- Do you even need social sharing buttons?
- Doug is considering building a premium social plugin. Are you interested in these features?
- Cached share counts.
- Automatically shows/hides the numbers if the share count is above/below a set amount.
- Custom color picker.
Follow us on Twitter: David at @davidhme and Doug at @Doug_Yuen.
Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:55 — 22.9MB)
Thanks for listening! If you liked this episode, please leave us a review in iTunes.
We’d love for you to comment below, or leave us a voicemail or message with your feedback.