The 10 best tools for getting more social shares

Are you avoiding using social media for your business? Don’t get enough shares to justify investing any time in social media?

You can easily change your social media strategy to improve not only the number of shares but engagement as well. As these factors improve, social media will come to look like a far better investment.

So what do you do to change and improve your social media strategy? Fortunately, there are many tools available that you can use or install on your WordPress website to increase your social shares.

1. Triberr

This tool is a must have for anyone who is involved in content marketing. This will help you to increase your traffic on Twitter or Facebook. This tools is a community of bloggers who share their own blog posts. This means you can not only get extra comments on your blog posts, but shares as well. This is a great way to get in contact with highly influential people in your niche. If you get lucky, they might even share your post.

2. WP Social Sharing

When people are reading content on your blog, you want to make it easy for them to share it. To help make that process simple, you can use WP Social Sharing.

Using WP Social Sharing, you can add attractive and responsive social sharing buttons to your website. These can be added to any WordPress post, page, media or custom post type. Buttons will share to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing and Pinterest. You can choose which social media buttons will be displayed, which order they will display and if they are displayed before or after content.  

Features of the plugin include:

• Custom social button text
• 100% responsive
• Add text before share buttons
• Integrates with any theme easily.

3. Image Sharer

Sometimes you have to think about more than getting people to share your whole blog post. Sometimes, people just want to share an awesome photo from your blog post. This is often very difficult to do. Without any way to share images, you could be missing out on tonnes of traffic.

That’s where Image Sharer comes in. The tool makes it simple for readers to share images on your site. Best of all, these images will link back to you, which will drive more traffic to your website.

Image Sharer gives you control of where your images can be shared to, with options including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Yummly. There’s also the option of downloading Image Sharer Pro, which removes the blue tab on your website and gives you VIP support for any technical issues.  

4. Shareaholic

Shareaholic describes itself as the “all-in-one growth platform”. It allows you to not only grow your website’s traffic, but also engage your audience and drive revenue.

There are four ways Shareaholic helps your website grow:

• Reach: using native ads and promoted content, you will be able to reach over 450 million people per month.
• Engage: Shareaholic will help to increase page views and increase the amount of time users spend on your website.
• Analyse: use Shareaholic’s analysis to get a deeper understanding of your audience.
• Revenue: generate money through native ads and affiliate links.

Shareaholic helps your business grow through social share buttons, shareable images and follow buttons.

This is a fairly advanced social sharing tool, and may not be for everyone. There are a lot of features that will take time to learn about. However, these tools are sure to help improve your website and change your market approach.

5. Canva

One way to guarantee more social media shares is to ensure your content has images. Infographics are shared 3 times more on social media than any other type of content. Tweets with images will receive 150% more retweets than those without images. It is clear that to gain more social shares, it is vital to include an image. After all, it makes your post more attractive, and makes it stand out from the crowded News Feed or Timeline.

Canva is one of the best tools to use to create social media graphics. Canva has professionally designed layouts for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram, to name a few platforms. It’s super easy to use, and graphics can be created under 5 minutes. Canva even has an app, so you can create images from you iPad.   

Using Canva, you’ll be sure to be creating shareable graphics in no time.

6. Tweriod

One of the key components of getting your content shared is simple - post your content when your audience is online. If you’re a local business, this is extremely important. You don’t want to be posting your best content while your audience is offline or asleep.

Tweriod lets you know when it is the best time to tweet. This is done through analysing your own tweets, plus the tweets of your followers. Tweriod will give you an analysis of your account, and will include information such as the day and time your tweets will get the most exposure.

Tweriod includes a free analysis up to 1000 followers. For statistics on more followers, you will need to access Premium Analysis. The tool is only designed to work on Twitter, but is a great tool to use if this is your preferred social media platform.

7. SocialRank

For those that use Twitter and Instagram, look no further, SocialRank is the tool for you. This tool makes it easy to identify, organise and manage your followers.

If you’re looking to get more social shares, you first need to know who your audience is. Otherwise, how do you know who to target? SocialRank helps make this task easier.

Using SocialRank, you can segment your followers using criteria such as most engaged, valuable, best followers and most followed. You can use filters such as location, activity and number of followers.

Using this data, you can build lists and accurately know who to target. This will not only help you to have a deeper understanding of your audience, but you may be able to alter your content and receive more social shares.

8. Google Trends

You can use as many tools as you want, but your content isn’t going to be shared if it’s no good. You need to be writing about topics that are not only relevant to your business, but are topics your audience is interested in.

Google Trends can help make this task easier. It gives you insight into the top trending topics for the past 24 hours. You can even narrow this down by category or location.

This tool will help serve as a guide to what you should write about. The main downside to writing content on current trends is you have to act fast. If you publish your post a week later, it will be irrelevant and no one will need to read or share it anymore. If you’re going to write about current trends, make sure to write and publish in a timely manner.

9. Buffer

Sometimes you lack social shares because you’re not posting frequently enough. It’s often difficult to maintain a frequent posting schedule on social media if you’re also busy with other tasks at work. It’s a task that can very easily be forgotten.

If that sounds like you, then Buffer will make your life much easier. You can use this tool to schedule your social media content to automatically post throughout the day. This saves you having to log in to your social media accounts throughout the day and when you’re out of the office. You can post to all social media networks, or customise each post. You can even add photographs and videos.

Once you start posting on social media on a frequent schedule, you’ll be sure to notice an increase in social media shares and engagement.

10. Wishpond

If you’re looking for a creative way to generate more shares, why not consider a contest? Wishpond will allow you to create contests and coupons for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

You can run sweepstakes, photo contents, hashtag contents, essay contests, photo caption contests - you name it, they’ll do it. Some of the features Wishpond uses includes voting buttons, like button popup, share buttons, referral rewards, custom form fields and daily entry and voting. This is a fun way to gain more shares, likes and traffic to your social media platforms and website.

Using these tools will ensure the content you are posting on your website and social media is relevant, optimised, interesting and more likely to be shared. You’ll be sure to notice an increase in not only sharing but likes, engagement and traffic flow to your website.