Ever come across an article that you know your friends on Facebook would love only to find it next to impossible to share via social media? We’re all in a bit of a hurry these days feeling rather busy and rushed. Let’s face it – if it isn’t easy to click a button and share it to Facebook or Twitter, it’s not going to happen.
Take International Naked Gardening Day, as an example. I knew my Facebook peeps would love it so I looked around for the standard one-click share button for Facebook. Nothing. How about Twitter? My followers would love it too. Any “Tweet This” button? Nope. Nothing. Nada.
Arghhhhh.
Frustrating. I mean c’mon if you want me to tell the world about your International Naked Gardening Day post, don’t make me jump through hoops to do it.
In order for me to share this site with my social media networks, I now have to:
#1: Copy and paste the URL – Double click on URL, right mouse click, and click on Copy
#2: Open Facebook in a new tab – Click for tab open, type ‘facebook.com’, hit Enter, enter name/email and click Login
#3: Post it on my wall – Right mouse click, click Paste, click Post button.
That’s a total of 10 clicks and approximately 20+ keyboard strokes (depending on your username and password all to benefit someone else by sharing their post.
Hint: in today’s busy world if you want someone to do something, make it SUPER SIMPLE and easy to do with as few clicks as possible.
One way to do this for your readers is to add a Facebook Share button and a Tweet button to your pages and posts.
If you have WordPress (which I highly recommend you do), then you’ll want to install two pugins: “FaceBook Share (New)” and “TweetMeme Retweet Button”. It shouldn’t take you more than 5 minutes to install and configure both of them.
After the plugins are installed, you have the ability to show the buttons on pages and/or posts, at the top and/or bottom of the page and whether to show the number of times the page/post has been shared or tweeted, along with a few other options.
If you’re not using WordPress, you’ll have to go manually install code for each of these on your site or in your HTML files. You may have to get your web designer to do this for you. For a Facebook Like button go to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/ and for Twitter go to http://twitter.com/about/resources/tweetbutton. You’ll find instructions for each on those pages.
One last suggestion: Tell your readers or viewers what you want them to do. If you want them to share it on Facebook, then tell them to. If you want them to tweet it, then tell them to. They will. Believe me. I do it all the time and it works.
Now before you go anywhere, share this on Facebook and leave a comment below. Tell me if your site is “Socially Sharable” or not and if not, what are you going to do about it? Like in the next hour?
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