5 Ways to optimize your web content for social media.

For web content writers, it’s tough enough trying to write for both our readers and the search engine algorithms.

Well, to make our lives more complicated, there is now another audience to factor in as we write.

We also need to optimize our content for social media.

Why? Because while a page of quality content can get some good traffic by achieving a high listing on Google, that same content can attract thousands of visitors within the first 12 hours by being optimized for social media.

And yes, there are certain factors that will make your content more likely to be shared through social media sites.

Here are five ways in which you can make your content more sharable.

1. Write a short, catchy headline.

This one sticks in my throat. I hate writing “catchy” headlines. And I don’t much like compressing a better, longer headline into a 7-word sound bite.

But if you want your page to be re-tweeted a thousand times, you need to make that headline catchy, compelling and intriguing.

Here are some examples of headlines that will do well with sites like Twitter and Facebook.

- 10 Things Your Waiter Doesn’t Want You to Know

- Why Teens Are Moving on from Facebook

- 17 Must-Have WordPress Plugins

- 3 Lies Your Teenager is Telling You

- How Seth Godin Takes His Protein

You get the idea. These headlines are not informative. They are teasers. You may recognize the approach from the covers of those magazines you browse while lining up at the supermarket checkout. The approach is the same. And it works gangbusters when you want your content shared through social media.

2. Open strong.

Frontload the high points of your article. Get them into the first 5 lines. Why? Because when people are sharing web pages, they will often just scan the headline and first few lines, think “That’s cool”, and add it to their Facebook page or Twitter stream.

In other words, the decision to share a page often comes before they finish reading it. If they finish at all.

Another reason to open strong is that sites like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn and others ask for an excerpt for the page listing. Other sites pick up the first few lines of the page automatically. So you may as well kill two birds with one stone and write the first 50 words as if they were an ad for the rest of the article. Which, of course, they are.

3. Lists, lists, lists.

Lists of almost any kind of hugely sharable.

It could be a list of top movies, a checklist of things to look for when buying a used car, a glossary of terms, a resources list and so on.

Lists have a high perceived value, but are easy to read.

4. Share the news.

News travels fast, particularly through social media. If you can be among the first to share something newsworthy about your topic or industry, you’ll get great exposure across most social media sites.

Social media and news were made for one another. We have seen how news of world events gets spread through Twitter before even CNN manages to get their first headline written.

Leverage that, and become a source of news for your industry or topic.

5. Multimedia.

A significant proportion of pages which become popular on social media sites contain little if any text.

Instead, they include photos, videos, slideshows, photos, charts, diagrams or infographics.

This is all part of the instant gratification that is an integral part of the social media experience. Not all shared content is short, but a lot of it is.

See if you can add some other media to your pages to give them that quick-share appeal.

This doesn’t mean you should stop writing text. It simple means including a multimedia element in addition to the text.

To summarize…

Not all content travels equally well through social media.

In particular, traditional, text-only, long-form content rarely gets shared by thousands or tens of thousands of social media users.

Does this mean you should optimize all the content on your website for social media? Not at all. Some information is better communicated in the form of long text pages. And a lot of pages are not suited to the tabloid headline approach.

But you can create a strategy whereby you create a specific body of content which is optimized for social media.

Use this optimized content to expand your reach, find new readers, and then draw them back to your site and convert them to readers of your other content.

The bottom line is that it’s no longer enough to optimize your content pages for your readers and the search engines.

You now have to optimize them for your readers, the search engines, and social media sites.

[NOTE: If you enjoyed this article, you’ll doubtless enjoy the daily content ideas I publish for Web Content Café members. Learn more about membership here...]