Content creation is hard and it takes time to come up with a content strategy, work out where you’re going to post and make sure what you’re creating resonates with your audience. Even if you’ve got all of this nailed and you’re creating great content then you’re still only about half way there.
If you’re not making sure your content is easy to distribute then you’re missing a trick, expecting users to share things themselves is fine, but why not make their lives easier and give them an easy option to share on the most popular sharing services?
What to use to share though? As this site is a static site generated using WordPress as a CMS – see more on how to create a static site using WordPress – we thought this would be easy. It turns out that like a lot of things in the WordPress ecosystem now the sharing plugins available are frequently premium, and the SERPS are full of ‘best social share button’ results that are lists of affiliate links. The frustration with this is probably a whole other post, but suffice to say it’s really hard to find a good social sharing plugin which allows you to share to the major platforms and which isn’t hugely bloated with code which ultimately slows down your site.
Enter Scriptless Social Sharing by Robin Cornett. It’s quick and easy to set up, works with Yoast SEO, and allows you to add and order sharing links for all the main places someone’s going to share your content to.
Go download it, have a play with it and thank us later!
Why’s WhatsApp first?
Facebook’s other messaging service is a behemoth, with over two billion monthly active users, and consistently across sites we have worked on we’ve seen more social shares via WhatsApp than any other service, including email and a simple copy/paste of the link. In fact on some sites sharing via WhatsApp is over 40% of the total of shares.
Scriptless Social Sharing as a plugin doesn’t come with any stats to show us how many people are clicking on each sharing service, but we’re not bothered about that because we’re tracking link clicks with Google Analytics so we can see which service gets the most clicks in our analytics service and look for ourselves which service is the most important to our audience.
Let us know if there are any other social sharing services which you like in the comments below.