Getting social shares to your online properties – whether it’s a website or a video – is the most powerful ranking factor that you can positively influence.
It’s also a white hat SEO strategy that will build trust in Google. Right now, the search engines love social signals.
Another benefit is the increase in traffic that your site will get -> leading to an increase in user signals.
Traffic and social shares lead to natural backlinks, assuming that your content is good. The result? All these user signals tie in nicely together and you get a powerful boost in your rankings.
How To Get Social Shares
In this post I’m going to show you a simple, but powerful strategy on how to get social shares to your videos and then create a hyperlink under the video pointing back to your website.
Sure, you can create a post on Facebook with a direct url link to your website in the post but if it doesn’t grab attention (and chances are it won’t, because everyone else is doing it) then it won’t get shared.
FACT No 1: Videos attract more attention than url links in a Facebook post. By piggy backing off video you can boost your chances of getting noticed and increase traffic back to your website.
FACT No 2: Videos that get uploaded directly to Facebook are viewed and shared more than on any other social media platform on the Internet.
And I’m not talking about embedding a YouTube video in your Facebook post. That’s what most people on a desktop PC do.
Don’t believe it? Test it out.
How many times has your YouTube video been organically shared through the embed link from YouTube?
Facebook isn’t the biggest fan of YouTube, because it’s owned by Google. A video uploaded directly to Facebook will get seen more than a YouTube video that’s shared in a post.
Uploading Directly To Facebook
What I’m referring to is making use of Facebook’s built in video uploader.
You can upload a video through Facebook’s mobile app – making it super easy to record something on your smartphone and then post it on Facebook, or you can use the desktop browser to upload a video that you’ve already got on your pc/laptop.
Here’s how to go about doing it:
(Info courteousy of https://www.facebook.com/help/166707406722029?sr=4)
Upload Instructions
1. Click at the top of your News Feed or Timeline
2. Click Upload Photos/Video and choose a video file from your computer
3. Click Post
Your video will need to process before others can see it on Facebook. When it’s ready to view, you’ll get a notification. Go to the video and click Edit to add a title, tag friends, choose a thumbnail and more.
Uploading is the easy part. To help you get more social shares read on.
Optimise Your Video To Get Traffic To Your Website
1. Add tags to your video just like you would when you upload to YouTube
2. Select the ‘Add a Call to Action’ option. This lets you add a hyperlink and select a button, like ‘Shop Now’ or ‘Read More’.
This is where you can send people directly to your website. Put the full url of your website in the hyperlink to get the benefit of a social share.
Make Your Video Share Worthy
Put yourself in the mind of the people that you want to share your video. They’ll share something if your video provides value or makes them look good.
Your video doesn’t have to be groundbreaking news but should offer something that they haven’t seen before. This could be a question or a shortcut tip/hack.
Does your video trigger an emotion? Is it funny or will it promote goodwill? These will all help it to go viral. The more people that see your video the more it’ll gain traction on other people’s FB pages.
Grab Attention
Remember that people are part of many groups and they see multiple posts in their newsfeed. Use an image to draw your audience in and remember to keep your video brief. No one wants to watch a video that’s longer than a couple of minutes.
A shorter video has a better chance of getting shared because people will watch it all the way to the end, instead of pausing it and saying “I’ll come back to this later”… later never happens.
Promote Your Post
If you’ve got content that you really want to get out there, it helps to spend a couple of bucks and promote your post. Facebook have published a statement that says only 16%, around 1 in 6, of your friends will see your posts.
If you’ve got several hundred or even a few thousand friends (or follows on your fan page) then paying a small amount to promote your post in other people’s newsfeeds can really help to boost the amount of times that your video, and your website hyperlink, gets shared.