- Share your content when your followers are most active
Use Followerwonk to determine when your Twitter followers are most active and schedule your social shares to happen at these times with Buffer.
- Tweet at the companies and people you mentioned in your content
People are a lot more likely to share your content if it’s about them. It strokes their ego and they like to stroke it more by retweeting if they find your site & content to be of quality. Plus, if you’re writing about them or their company they are also likely to have a larger following than most. - Share your content with popular & relevant hash tags
Just start typing in #keyword in Twitter and see if a recommended hash tag pops up that’s relevant to your content. You can also search the hash tag to see how popular it is and what type of content is generally posted using it. Of course, don’t overdo the hashtags like I did in my poor example tweet above =P
- Use sexy social sharing toolbars that follow readers as they scroll through your content such as Flare
Make sure to use widgets rather than just icon links, as they make it a lot easier for users to share and keep them on your website as well.
- Build an email subscriber list
Your fans are more likely to share your content and this way they’ll know about your new content soon after you’ve published it.
Keep your opt-in form in view at all times with a sticky widget to increase your subscription rates.
- Post your best content on popular, relevant social news sites, groups and forums
If done in the right way, to the right audience, at the right time your content can get picked up and grow substantially. For example when one of my pieces of content made the front page of Hacker News it resulted in 6,713 visits directly from Hacker News, as well as 1,374 visits from Twitter and fall out traffic from many other sources resulting in 12,994 visits in a single day! @lexKrasny has seen great results from promoting content in relevant Google+ Communities and recommends this tactic heavily.
- Use Social Locker for the meat of your evergreen content
If you have proven content that has a particularly meaty portion to it, you can throw that part in a Social Locker and require people to share it in order to access it. I’ve done this on only two posts and in only one month this tactic has acquired an additional 62 social shares.
- Ask people to share your content
It can really help if done right. Just do so in a casual, friendly, persuasive manner. - Write clever titles and introductions to your content
People won’t ever get to your great content if it doesn’t grab their attention to begin with, so spend some time writing clever, yet concise titles. Once they do get to your content, they likely won’t bother to read much of it if the beginning to it is bland, so if you’re going to have an introduction make sure it adds value. - Create content that you would share
If you wouldn’t share it yourself then why would your readers share it? - Use Tweet this when relevant
HubSpot uses this tactic very well by posting lists of a bunch of interesting statistics and includes links for each one to “Tweet This Stat” with the Click To Tweet service. - Market your other relevant content
If you’re running WordPress use something like the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin like I do below my bio beneath this post.
