There’s no denying that social media can be a powerful tool, driving traffic to your website or blog and putting your company name in front of many more potential customers.
In fact, growing on social media has a number of benefits for your brand:
- Sharing your content on social media allows you to provide excellent resources, news, and ideas to establish yourself as an engineering authority.
- It’ll help increase your social visibility within a larger community to help potential new clients notice you.
- Being active on social media encourages people to engage with you.
- Social platforms help build reputation, trust, and loyalty for your brand.
But in order to get your engineering content noticed on socials, you’ll need to up your social sharing game. This includes you sharing your content on social media yourself as well as encouraging your readers and followers to share your content with their peers.
So to help you get started, I’ll be sharing some quick tips on how to boost social sharing for your engineering content.
1. Understand which platforms suit your content type best
There are dozens of different social media platforms. And when it comes to sharing your engineering content, the first and most important step is to figure out which platforms work best for you and your type of content.
Different platforms appeal to different audiences and focus on particular types of content. Short-form portrait videos, for example, are best suited to TikTok, Instagram, and even YouTube, while images work well on Pinterest and Instagram, and text-only posts and links will be more successful on LinkedIn and Facebook.
So you need to decide on what type of content you want to be producing and which platform your target audience is likely to be on.
Ideally, you’d select a handful of social media platforms to focus on without going overboard and wanting to do it all.
In order to successfully manage a social media page, after all, you have to put time and effort into it, so you’re better off focusing on the top few platforms where you will see the greatest return on investment.
2. Share content when your target audience is most active
Like search engines, social media runs on an algorithm. If you post content at a time when your audience is very active and you receive a lot of initial interaction, the social media algorithm reads your content as engaging and will be more likely to push it to new audiences.
This is why it’s important to push social media content when your target audience is active.
Of course, focusing on one geographical area is helpful — if you’re targeting followers in London, United Kingdom, for example, pushing content at the right times within the UK time zone is helpful. But if you’re targeting followers in London and Hong Kong, your scheduling may be a little more complicated since you want to reach both audiences.
This is where content management tools (more on this further down) and native schedulers become so helpful, as they allow you to plan and share content across multiple channels at different times.
You can even set up sharing the same (or similar) content twice to target different geographical areas, but keep in mind that this will only work for some platforms, like X or Facebook.
3. Always ask your audience to share your content
If your followers are already enjoying your content, why not ask them to share it with their peers who may also find it helpful?
Social sharing is widespread, and most users will automatically share content with their friends if they find it relevant, but some users may require an extra nudge to persuade them to share.
Asking your audience to like, share, or follow is pretty standard practice, if done tactfully.
This doesn’t only go for content on social media but also applies to engineering blog content on your website. Adding in a little note or social share buttons can give you a nice little boost.
4. Always add social media buttons to your blog
Most social media platforms will have a variety of sharing options, but your blog page needs to be set up in a way to enable social sharing.
There are two types of social media buttons you’d need:
- Your blog should always contain buttons and links that direct to your own social media platforms. Placing these in your header or footer is generally a good idea, so people can always find you on socials.
- But every blog post should also include social sharing buttons, enabling readers to easily share your content on their socials by simply clicking a button. Having these in a sticky sidebar is particularly helpful, but you can also add prominent buttons to the top or bottom of your post.
You can also enable highlight-to-share features, where readers can highlight a certain section of your text and share that directly on their social platforms.
5. Add a call-to-action
Just like call-to-actions are helpful if you’re marketing your business, a call for interaction can be equally beneficial when promoting social media.
This means you should always add a CTA to your blog or social media posts, asking readers to make their thoughts heard — perhaps you could ask for feedback or suggestions, or even just their opinion.
You could even add feedback forms, polls, or surveys to make this easier (depending on the platform you’re using, of course).
Don’t forget that social media is focused on the social part of it, so if readers take the time to comment, you’ll need to continue to engage.
6. Post customer reviews
A good way to make the feedback you receive work for you is by simply making it public.
Consider highlighting positive customer reviews on your site, using quotes in your writing, or posting them on social media.
This will reinforce the fact that you listen to your customer’s opinions, create an air of transparency, and act as social proof for your brand.
7. Interview industry experts
If you’re producing content and following social sharing steps but still not seeing the success you’d like, you could consider publishing content from popular voices who already have large followings.
Posting interviews with industry experts on your website (and cross-sharing to socials) is one of the most efficient strategies for getting shares.
8. Using social media management tools
I’ve mentioned these briefly above, but using social media management tools like Later, MeetEdgar, SocialBee, Buffer, Sprout Social, CoSchedule, or Hootsuite can really help you manage your social media.
Using these won’t help you with social sharing directly, but they definitely will help you manage your efforts, freeing up time you can then use to focus on the engagement side of things.
Creating an effective social media strategy
It’s easy to focus on just producing interesting content, but social media is a social platform, and you may need to add in an extra few steps to make your content shareable.
But it’ll be time well spent.
Contact us if you need help creating engineering content that will fit into your social sharing plan.
Social Sharing FAQs
Social media management tools like Later, MeetEdgar, SocialBee, Buffer, Sprout Social, CoSchedule, or Hootsuite allow you to manage multiple social platforms from one profile. You can plan and schedule your posts, add captions, repeat evergreen posts, and more, saving you a lot of time and effort.
Sharing blog posts should be one aspect of your social media marketing strategy, but you should definitely still be producing native content. Some platforms or styles are also more friendly to repeat sharing — for instance, you can definitely share a story linking a blog post multiple times a week on your Instagram Stories, but you may only get away with doing this every couple of months in your grid posts.
Most native social media analytics tools will give you all the information you need, while Google Analytics will give you insights into how your blog posts are shared on social media and how much traffic is coming to your site from socials.
