It should be obvious by now that content by itself is useless without an audience. How do you build one? One way is to increase shareability.

It’s not about adding dozens of social media buttons.

It’s about making key decisions on numerous aspects of a website including the content, user experience, SEO, etc.

Keep off Buttonitis

Buttonitis is a truly painful disease that spreads like wildfire. People looking at your site suffer from eye strain and trembling hands. Too many colors and too many options hurt. In the worst case you have two or more lines of several buttons that all show a “zero” as a negative social proof of the lack of your popularity:

In psychology they speak of choice overload. There are even whole studies about it [PDF]. Less is more. Overwhelming choices don’t make people share. Choice overload leads to paralysis. People do not choose at all when faced with too many options.

Pick a few options

Choose the social sites you support wisely by showing their logos. Don’t forget the common sense options “mail” and “link”. While large content-driven sites always offer a hyperlink, a mail sharing option and social media integration, most bloggers just flaunt social media buttons like some poor kid who advertises Nike on his sweater for free. Is your audience really on Reddit? Do you really have images worthy of being shared on Pinterest? Do people “discover” your content for others on StumbleUpon?

Choose the appropriate sites depending on who you deal with and what topics you cover.

Are you dealing with Fashion? Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr may be good options to choose. Is your site about business and technology? LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter may connect you with the right audiences. Are you dealing with health, law or politics? Mail is the best way to spread the word without compromising the privacy of your readers.

Only show share numbers when there is something to show. When the number of shares is zero, don’t show the number at all or use an encouraging call-to-action like “start the conversation” or something similar. Ideally, you use custom buttons of the same color. At least they should be the same size and form and use the same font.

Remember that the most important way of sharing is still manually taking your link and adding it to another site. Embedding is also a good idea. Simply providing a link to copy is already a great start though. Note how Issuu even lets you link to particular pages inside of publications. You can also provide anchor links to your content parts.

Provide enough room for sharing

Many sites include button on their pages but only in prefect circumstances. Personally I use a sidebar that covers many social media widgets so that I can’t see the button or click them. Many sites use frames or scripts in such a way that my bookmarklets get hidden or do not work.

I regularly have to switch to “full page” view to be able to share things to Google+ because otherwise the actual share button would end up below the fold and when I scroll it scrolls with me so I can never reach it.

Sometimes the buttons are partly or completely hidden, especially the moving side widgets so many blogs use these days. I use a windows sidebar and another sidebar from my Firefox browser so that many sites can’t cope when they have a fixed width set.

Keep it succinct

Ernest Hemingway taught me one thing about writing. No, it’s not that you need to be an adventurous man to write better. You need to use short sentences people can understand with ease. Using complicated sentences and seldom used words only confuses readers. As a writer, you need to make complicated things simple. You are translating the world to your readers.

On the Web this is truer than ever: the shorter your sentences and the easier to grasp, the better.

Moreover, you need to make each sentence be able to stand alone for readability and shareability. Each sentence you write should work on its own without the context of the post. You need to enable readers to slice out any sentence. A sentence should contain a full message of its own to be shareable as a quote. Write succinct sentences to engage online audiences.

I exaggerated in this paragraph a bit to prove the point. Using the same term (here “sentences”) half a dozen of times is bad style. For many other words, there are sufficiently apt synonyms though. Then you can, of course, cherry-pick some quotes you’d like people to spread and use tools like TweetDis to simplify the process of sharing them.

Don’t break copy and pasting

Some sites are coded badly so that they break copy and pasting. Not only do many site owners forget to offer the option to link to a page or article, they also actively prevent you from copying and pasting a link. I use the “info” option of my browser a lot to circumvent the problem of broken copy and paste. Some sites do not even let you select a headline or part of text.

Optimize for people not search engines

Some SEO practitioners tend to solely focus on Google’s demands. When they have an article dealing with Google, they will shorten their URLs for example to domain.com/blog/google so that when you only see the URL (like in a mail message) you have no incentive to click on it.

Why would you click the umpteenth article about Google on some irrelevant blog you have never heard of?

They also limit the headlines to matter of fact but boring and repetitive keywords and come with something like “Just Create Great Content to Please Google” and the link gets shortened to domain.com/blog/content-Google then. Sounds intriguing? Of course not.

A headline and URL optimized for people and thus shareability would be more along the lines of “Bankrupt Publisher: Just Create Great Content to Please Google”. The URL would sound better as domain.com/blog/bankrupt-publisher-great-google – Note how the contrast works to spice up a rather bland headline consisting otherwise of solely keyphrases and stop words.

Photo Credit: The sharing hands image has been created by the illustrators from Freepik.com